Clinical Writing About Patients

Inhibition in the dissertation writing process: Barrier, block, and impasse.

“…In the early decades of psychoanalysis, there was interest in the idea of intellectual inhibition, which may directly interfere with a child's ability to express his innate potentials in the classroom, and specifically, in academic work (e.g., Freud, 1905Freud, /1953Freud, -1974Flügel, 1923;Travis, 1924;Klein, 1931;Schmideberg, 1938). There is also a recognition of how our psychoanalytic writing may be held back by concerns around writing about our patients (e.g., Bridges, 2007), as well as how fantasies around the audience of one's work influence the tone of such work (e.g., Barale, 1993). A shift away from an interest in inhibition can be seen in the idea that something takes place within the person who is unable to perform in some way more fundamental than inhibition and attention swung toward these other processes.…”