Structure and Spontaneity in Clinical Prose ― A Writer's Guide for Psychoanalysts and Psychotherapists

"Structure and Spontaneity in Clinical Prose will teach you how to read gifted writers for inspiration and practical lessons in the craft of writing. It will help you apply the principles and techniques that characterize the paradigmatic, narrative, evocative, enactive, and lyric narrative modes of clinical prose and put what you learn immediately into practice in 85 writing exercises. Each of the 5 modes uses different means to construct worlds out of language. The paradigmatic abstracts ideas from experience to build concepts and theories. The narrative mode organizes experience through time, creating meaningful relationships between causes and effects. Lyric narratives present events unfolding in an uncertain present before hindsight anchors meaning. The evocative mode works by invitation and suggestion, and the enactive creates an experience to be lived as well as thought. Structure and Spontaneity is fundamentally a book about reading and writing differently. Whether you are doing the exercises, drafting a paper, writing clinical notes, or preparing for supervision, by experimenting with various modes of clinical prose, you will make discoveries about your patients, your work, and yourself. This book will be an invaluable resource for new and experienced psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, other mental health professionals, students, teachers, journal editors, and writers in the humanities and social sciences"--Provided by publisher.

Suzi Naiburg is a graduate and faculty member of the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis in private practice in Belmont, MA. She is also a writing coach, teacher, and editor who taught expository writing at Harvard and more than 50 clinical writing workshops.