Books: You Too Can Write

THE WRITER AND PSYCHOANALYSIS (265 pp.) — Edmund Bergler — Doubleday ($3.50).

In this formidable treatise, Analyst Bergler wrestles with the problem of the writer who has copy paper, a late-model portable, an old farm in Connecticut, a nice wife, the right agent, and no ideas. The fellow need not worry, since Analyst Bergler finds that he can cure nearly 100% of such cases, and says so in a brash passage recalling the palmy days of the old sure-cure Indian remedies.

Every writer's urge, he holds, is sprung by some jolt at weaning time; the adult writer's flow of words is a psychological substitute for the flow of milk he wanted and did not get, plus a recompense for all the guilt he has subconsciously felt since his diaper days. Once the analyst has worked the anxious writer back to the point where he can endorse mother's product without fear, shame or remorse, it's simply a matter of putting a fresh sheet of paper into the machine and hitting the keys.

At such a happy time, says Writer Bergler, there is little need for thought, either, since ideas don't come that way; they just originate in the hurricane cellar of the unconscious, and the writer traps them as they break for the open. According to Bergler, the writer's function is like that of a man erecting a prefabricated house; in writing, he merely assembles slabs of his inner conflicts and his repressed desires in story form.

Analyst Bergler has developed his ideas about writing and writers from the case histories of 36 writers who felt wretched enough to go to him for treatment. What Bergler may not clearly see is that in developing his interesting argument, he is performing a party trick rather like pulling a rug out from under his own feet. By the book's end, the reader has been taught to wonder what compulsion makes a man set out to explain most of the world's literature as just an infant's whimper for a bountiful teat.

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