Thinking on Paper

Many writers say that they write to know what they think. Stephen King, Joan Didion, and Flannery O’Connor are said to have said as much.I have read that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts once wrote two legal opinions from opposing perspectives to understand the reasoning behind each and be certain of his opinion. Published legal opinions, research papers, and essays frequently refer to prior writings for history, context, and authority.

For this article, I searched online for Flannery O’Connor’s quote about writing. O’Connor wrote, “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” My search for O’Connor’s quote about writing turned up a link to a 2008 National Library of Medicine article about Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training’s four-year curriculum devoted to analysis through writing. As of 2021, Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training’s website states Columbia seeks to teach students to “capture psychoanalytic process in writing, essential for publication and communication with other analysts about their work.”

Merriam Webster defines psychoanalysis as “a method of dealing with psychic disorders by having the patient talk freely about personal experiences and especially about early childhood and dreams.” “Psychobabble” is the next listing in my paper dictionary. “Psychodrama” is the next word. I participated in psychodrama in the 1990’s. Flannery O’Connor’s wrote spiritually analytic fiction. If Flannery O’Connor were alive today, she might be surprised at how newer readers judge her life, times, and thought processes. In 2020, Jesuit Loyola University removed O’Connor’s name from a residence hall named for her. O’Connor, a southern Catholic, fell from favor because her writing reflects the context and vernacular common during her lifespan, 1925-1964.

Context matters.

The May 20 Post-Standard included an Associated Press article about Christopher Columbus’s true ancestry. After 515 years of mystery, DNA could establish that the Genoan navigator who sailed for Spain might be Portuguese, Croatian, or Polish. Researchers seek to resolve mysteries “so that there is no argument.” Would DNA change how local people think and feel about Christopher Columbus’s downtown statue?

More about everything is always being revealed.

My experience in therapy and support groups; my BA in Psychology; my reading about developing consciousness and psychiatric history; together with my leisure time reading about brain function and brain injuries lead me to conclude that anything written yesterday about specific individuals today is likely to be inaccurate tomorrow.

In the mid-1960’s, after I’d experienced severe trauma, TBI, and what I’ll label here, iatrogenic TBI, a family member gave me a baby blue “Dear Diary” with a lock and key. I don’t remember what I wrote apart from “got up,” “went to bed,” and then ditto marks. Decades later, I started keeping a diary/journal that included newly emerging, seemingly hallucinatory memories, descriptions of dreams, and my own dream analyses using Jungian symbolism. Based on my study and experience, our subconscious and unconscious talk to us through dreams. Our dreams speak our language and not as symbolically as dream dictionaries might suggest. My journals reflect the journey of my conscious mind in its effort to find itself and heal itself amid misinformation, disinformation, and lack of information resulting from brain injury. I know today that anything I might have written in my notebooks or said to a psychotherapist prior to 2011 lacks context. This means the therapists’ notes lack context as well.

In her book, “The Heart of Trauma,” Bonnie Bodenoch Ph.D. discusses how current MRI research seeks concrete understanding of brain function by imaging brains that renew themselves daily through sleep cycles, including dreaming, detoxification via cerebrospinal fluid, and accumulation of new experience and information.

The ancient philosopher Heraclitus is said to have said “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” The history of any civilization, including Western Civilization, is the aggregate of individual and collective journals and journeys. The words journal and journey stem from the Latin term diurnum, meaning daily portion.

Consciousness updates daily.In the May “My Mind to Yours.” I wrote, “at work, we depend on positive salary reviews from our bosses.” True. Then I wrote, “we ignore their gut feelings…” Not accurate.
I wanted to say, “we ignore our gut feelings,” or “people ignore their gut feelings.” I intended to simply articulate that when authorities confront subordinates, subordinates are under pressure to comply with those authorities. I believe broad terms such as “we” and “people” imply inclusion which doesn’t uniformly exist. Struggling not to paint anyone with blanket assessments, I ended up saying the opposite of what I meant.

I try to read, re-read, and update when necessary.

Debra Merryweather