An Antidote to Fear and Loathing of the Empty Page: Suzi Naiburg’s Structure and Spontaneity in Clinical Prose

Abstract

F or me there’s great pleasure in a book about writing by a writer who is thrilled by good writing. Some books of this kind, which have been important to me, are E.B. White’s Elements of Style, Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, and Natalie Goldberg’s Writing down the Bones. All of these writers dispute—and in their writings belie—the notion that words are cheap and can never capture the depth of human experience. Now I’ve added Suzi Naiburg’s Structure and Spontaneity in Clinical Prose to this group and am about to write it a rave review. What makes Naiburg’s book special is that she is not only a writer and writing teacher, who loves reading and writing, but she’s also a psychoanalyst who knows our particular field and literature well. It seems that she’s read and absorbed everything. Moreover, she has a deep and detailed understanding of good analytic writing—its structures and stylistic modalities—which she beautifully expresses, illustrates, and makes accessible to her readers. She even provides exercises that promote lively and conscious prose, prose that accurately reflects who we are and what we want to say. Because Naiburg has directed this book particularly to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists—a group responsible for spectacularly arid and turgid literature—she explicates with nuanced understanding how clinicians can relive and vividly capture their experiences in writing. And strewn throughout the book are excellent analytic writing samples as well as follow-up exercises. Thus, we can profitably use what she has