Structure and Spontaneity in Clinical Prose

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, lyric, evocative, and enactive modes of clinical prose and put what you learn immediately into practice in 84 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 in new ways.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 is an invaluable resource for new and experienced psychoanalysts and psychotherapists and for students, teachers, editors, and writers in the humanities and social sciences.

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.

"A good writer who goes for the jugular, I mean the heart. Suzi Naiburg has a real feel for what writing is and can do, a blessing not all share". - Michael Eigen, The Birth of Experience "Structure and Spontaneity in Clinical Prose is a rare find, a real gem that combines wisdom for writers and editors. Its multilayered analytic approach will assist would-be authors to find their voice and helps us all deepen our readings of clinical prose. Dr. Naiburg is a gifted teacher whose wealth of experience in guiding others is conveyed on every page. As an editor, I find her insights invaluable". - Joe Cambray, past president of the International Association for Analytical Psychology, former US editor of The Journal of Analytical Psychology "Suzi Naiburg's book brings clinical writing alive as art and lived experience and offers a stunning understanding of what it takes to create good clinical prose. Her book is a splash of clear cold water on the familiar landscape of arid, artless clinical writing. Dr. Naiburg is