The Writing Cure - (Psychoanalytic Horizons) by Emma Lieber (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In The Writing Cure, Emma Liebertells the story of her decade-long analysis, and her becoming a psychoanalyst, by tracing dreams, scenes, and signifiers that emerged from her analysis while also undertaking critical explorations of works of psychoanalytic theory and literary texts. The Writing Cure thus articulates what psychoanalysis does for its patients by writing the moment of its termination in real time, performing the convergence of theory and life on which psychoanalysis itself balances.

Throughout, Lieberconsiders what psychoanalysis--"the talking cure"--has to do with writing: the foundation of psychoanalysis on Freud's distinctive writing practice; what it means to write oneself as a psychoanalyst; the extent to which the cure involves a new kind of self-writing. Most broadly, The Writing Cure asks: What would it look like to write your way to the end of an analysis? Is it possible to write yourself into the position of psychoanalyst? Is it possible to write your cure?

Review Quotes

Deliberately conferring the narrator and the text the same status, Emma Lieber generates an ontologic chiasmus, like the one we experience in dreams, that creates a writing style that is no longer narrative but poetic. This style merges biographical and dreamlike residues on which the psychoanalytic process is based, exposing the emergence of a particular form of language when the author ventures into exploring the advent of a subject.
Derek Humphreys, Psychoanalyst and Lecturer in Clinical Psychopathology and Psychoanalysis, Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, France

This engaging and creative work defies conventional genres. Emma Lieber invites her readers to join her on an exploratory adventure into an inner world composed of wordplay, dreams, literature, theory, love, and the quotidian dramas and rituals of lived life. This compelling and beautiful book is at once a love letter to the creative potential of psychoanalysis, a gift to her analyst, an encounter with her younger self, and a playful engagement with all the thinkers and writers who have shaped her world. Throughout, Lieber writes eloquently and courageously about how writing allows her to let a genuinely unknown future emerge.
Elissa Marder, Professor of French & Comparative Literature, Emory University, USA, and author of The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Psychoanalysis, Photography, Deconstruction (2012)

About the Author

Emma Lieber is a psychoanalyst with a practice in New York City and part-time faculty in Literary Studies at the New School, USA. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cabinet, The Point Magazine, LitHub, New England Review, The Massachusetts Review, European Journal of Psychoanalysis, Slavic Review, Slavic and East European Journal, among others.