Writing Lived Experience - A Melancholy Elegy

This paper explores the limitations of language in psychotherapeutic writing about lived experience and how psychanalytic concepts can help us both understand and work through the inevitable loss that results from these limitations. It is illustrated by the author's experience of undertaking a doctoral research project in psychotherapy where the experience of narrative incoherence was explored through writing. Paralleled to the doctoral research project was the challenges the author faced in writing the experience of incoherence. By reflecting on and analysing these challenges, this paper explores the sense of loss that is located at the core of writing lived experience through psychoanalytic concepts including the third position and melancholia. Light is shed on the limitations of language in capturing the fullness of lived experienced. Connecting the psychoanalytic concept of melancholia to Romanyshyn's (2013) writing as elegy, this paper proposes writing lived experience as a melancholy elegy in which what is lost in language can be acknowledged and kept alive in the writer's psyche. The continuous engagement with the sense of loss in writing lived experience as a source for creative power and an ethical commitment are discussed.