Amateur Literary Creativity of Men as a Form of Self-Psychotherapy

In this article, we propose to look at amateur literary creativity (writing) as a self-therapeutic practice. Based on 11 in-depth interviews with male amateur writers, we demonstrate that writing can be both a way to solve life’s problems and a means of helping to change one's attitude towards them. We highlight several basic functions of artistic writing (in addition to the struggle for cultural and economic recognition in the literary field, which were already discussed by Bourdieu): an outburst of emotions, aestheticization of difficult everyday experience, implicit communication with people through text. However, despite the fact that writing can have a positive effect on the well-being and action strategies of informants, we also note a number of difficulties associated with the implementation of this practice. The study demonstrates that sometimes male writers (especially at a young age) face the reproach that “writing is not a man's business”. In particular, informants point out that their passion for writing is not perceived (by partners, friends, relatives, etc.) as significant or even existential for their lives if it does not bring income and success. Finally, the last difficulty associated with amateur writing is the dilemma that arises when trying to publish their manuscripts. Informants who have been rejected are faced with the problem of making their work “convenient” for the needs of publishers (thereby depriving themselves of writing as a practice of self-therapy), or continuing to write in such a way that writing continues to perform a therapeutic function, but agreeing to obscurity.

literary writing, gender, therapeutic culture, literary field