Writing as Healing :: essays papers

Writing as mend Chapter five, Writing as Healing and the Rhetorical Tradition Sorting Out Plato, Postmodernism, Writing Pedagogy, and Post-Traumatic Stress disorderliness written by T.R. Johnson of the University of New Orleans describes the different views of how language helps a person who has encountered a traumatic experience overcome and heal. Chapter nine, Pathography and Enabling Myths The Process of Healing written by Anne Hunsaker Hawkins of Pennsylvania State University discusses how personal authorship, such as autobiographies and biographies, promote healing in regards to illness. Both of these two chapters speak about writing in regards to healing, but chapter nine speaks about a specific writing that tends to be more effective. Classical logotherapists believed that disease and illness inflicted a person in order to punish a person for something he/she had done. The illness was also viewed as a form of trauma that deformed ones suit by society of the classi cal era and healing of the illness restored ones identity and moral purity. Healers used verbal charms, prayers, and incantations in order to sweat out the demon that caused the illness from the infected person. Plato believed that healing occurred in a plane of absolute, unchanging truths above and beyond the plane of lived experience. In other words, Plato jilted the idea of that language could heal the diseased or traumatized person.Postmodern healers believe that healing occurs through self-actualization which occurs through writing, another form of language. They feel that writing volition provide an insight to the individual and that insight will allow the healing process to begin.It is said that pathography allows a person to heal because one consistently remembers impertinently details when one writes about a particular experience. The remembering of these details are imperative to the healing process because it not only allows the person to stomach through the experie nce by re-telling it also allows one to get beyond the traumatic experience. The healing process often occurs through writing an autobiography or biography because the writer soon begins to feel that others should learn from his/her experience, which bridges self-suffering and the outside world. Pathography demonstrates that healing oneself often involves reaching out to others, which writing does.