ABSTRACT
Utilizing a form of writing familiar to writers and readers of imaginative works, this chapter demonstrates a form of psychoanalytic writing that may be used productively in the conduct of self-analysis. It describes a form of self-analysis generated in the process of writing a fictional account of an analytic experience. The chapter presents a search of the psychoanalytic literature and writings on the subject of the therapeutic function of the act of reading. The analyst's personal past emerges and reemerges, the understanding of which is transformed in part by the self-analytic fictions that are created. While psychoanalytic terminology is often inadequate to convey the substance of emotional experience, the language found in works of fiction frequently makes possible the communication of such experience, just as dreams do. The act of reading fiction thus served a therapeutic function. It restored a sense of movement and aliveness and fostered the capacity for a degree of self-reflection.
