Hide and seek: Writing fiction as a way of finding hidden selves

ABSTRACT

This paper is interested in the hidden selves that hover silently in the spaces that all human relationships create. It asks how these hidden self-states can find the light of day and suggests that one way is through fictional creative writing. The author shares a piece of fictional writing in which an elusive character—Isobel—appears. This ethereal and fictional manifestation occurs in the context of excruciatingly painful relational experiences in which the narrator describes repetitive and painful struggles for transformation. Speculative attempts to understand the meaning of the fictional material reveal an emerging forward edge and a fledgling sense of agency. But more. It elaborates how the creative writing process offers a different kind of lens through which to locate, elaborate, see, experience and be empathic with our own and, by extension, with our patients’ hidden self-states.

KEYWORDS:

• Agency
• alter-ego selfobject experience
• fictional creative writing
• forward edge
• hidden self states

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the members of my writing groups whose presence and comments—editorial and otherwise helped this piece of writing: Sarah Mendelsohn, Heather Ferguson, Jan Chess, Dan Perlitz, Margy Sperry, Chole Thata and Carolyn Hart. Suzi Naiburg did all this and more.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ The experience involves a dialogue between different facets within a person, and between people, and emerges in the “traumatic world that people existentially share with, and hide from themselves and each other” (Togashi & Kottler, 2021, p. 187).

² This entire process could be understood as an experience-near real time demonstration of the alter-ego aspect of an experience of being human with other human. It involves a dialogue between different facets within myself and between me and you, the reader, which has emerged in the “traumatic world that people existentially share with, and hide from themselves and each other” (Togashi & Kottler, 2021).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amanda Kottler

Amanda Kottler, M.A. (Clin. Psych.) is a clinical psychologist practicing as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in Cape Town, South Africa. She is a founding and faculty member of the Cape Town Psychoanalytic Self Psychology Group and an Emeritus Council Member of the International Association of Self Psychology. She lectures at the University of Cape Town. Her academic interests are in the areas of similarities and difference and how this intersects with a sense of feeling at home and belonging – feeling human among other human beings. She has co-edited two previous books: New Developments in Self Psychology Practice by Peter Buirski and Amanda Kottler. Jason Aronson 2007, and Culture, Power and Difference: Discourse Analysis in South Africa by Ann Levett, Amanda Kottler, Erica Burman and Ian Parker. Zed Books 1997 and is a co-author of Kohut’s Twinship across Cultures: The Psychology of Being Human, Routledge 2015.