ABSTRACT
Psychodynamic approaches usually concentrate attention on the role of anxiety as an accompaniment of human experience. In relation to writing, for example, there has been a fair amount written on publication anxiety and oedipal competition, including the famous "anxiety of influence" thesis as initiated by literary critic Harold Bloom. "Depth psychology" hardly begins with psychoanalysis, as its nineteenth-century literary sources are, arguably, many. Friends and family experience considerable hardship and are disempowered by cumulative negative events, feelings of powerlessness, self-criticism, shame, threats, and many others. Family members risk deterioration in their physical and psychological wellbeing from the stresses of living with such difficulties, their relationships skewed and roles are distorted. In situations of massive social trauma, with ongoing occupation and removal, there are always levels of knowing and non-knowing, and literary and metaphorical resources provide one of the ways in which such realities can be defended against oblivion.
