BiblioVault - Books about Self-disclosure

Cutting and the Pedagogy of Self-Disclosure

Jeffrey Berman

University of Massachusetts Press, 2007

Cutting, a form of self-mutilation, is a growing problem in the United States, especially among adolescent females. It is regarded as self-destructive behavior, yet paradoxically, people who cut themselves generally do not wish to die but to find relief from unbearable psychological pain.

Cutting and the Pedagogy of Self-Disclosure is the first book to explore how college students write about their experiences as cutters. The idea behind the book arose when Patricia Hatch Wallace, a high school English teacher, wrote a reader-response diary for a graduate course taught by Professor Jeffrey Berman in which she revealed for the first time that she had cut herself twenty years earlier. At Berman's suggestion, Wallace wrote her Master's thesis on cutting. Not long after she finished her thesis, two students in Berman's expository writing course revealed their own experiences as cutters. Their disclosures encouraged several students in another writing class to share their own cutting stories with classmates. Realizing that so many students were writing about the same phenomenon, Berman and Wallace decided to write a book about a subject that is rarely discussed inside or outside the classroom.

In Part 1, Wallace discusses clinical and theoretical aspects of cutting and then applies these insights to several memoirs and novels, including Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted, Caroline Kettlewell's Skin Game, and Patricia McCormick's Cut. The motivation behind Wallace's research was the desire to learn more about herself, and she reads these stories through her own experience as a cutter. In Part 2, Berman focuses on the pedagogical dynamics of cutting: how undergraduate students write about cutting, how their writings affect classmates and teachers, and how students who cut themselves can educate everyone in the classroom about a problem that has personal, psychological, cultural, and educational significance.

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Personal Effects

edited by Deborah H. Holdstein & David Bleich

Utah State University Press, 2002

In Personal Effects, Holdstein and Bleich compile a volume that cuts across the grain of current orthodoxy. These editors and contributors argue that it is fundamental in humanistic scholarship to take account of the personal and collective experiences of scholars, researchers, critics, and teachers.

With this volume, then, these scholars move us to explore the intersections of the social with subjectivity, with voice, ideology, and culture, and to consider the roles of these in the work of academics who study writing and literature. Taken together, the essays in this collection carry forward the idea that the personal, the candidly subjective and intersubjective, must be part of the subject of study in humanities scholarship. They propose an understanding of the personal in scholarship that is more helpful because more clearly anchored in human experience.

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Risky Writing

Self-Disclosure and Self-Transformation in the Classroom

Jeffrey Berman

University of Massachusetts Press, 2002

This is the final volume in a trilogy of works that examine the impact of writing and reading about traumatic subjects. Diaries to an English Professor (1994) explores the ways in which undergraduate students use psychoanalytic diaries to probe conflicted issues in their lives. Surviving Literary Suicide (1999) investigates how graduate students respond to suicidal literature—novels and poems that portray and sometimes glorify self-inflicted death.

In Risky Writing, Jeffrey Berman builds on those earlier studies, describing ways teachers can encourage college students to write safely on a wide range of subjects often deemed too personal or too dangerous for the classroom: grieving the loss of a beloved relative or friend, falling into depression, coping with the breakup of one's family, confronting sexual abuse, depicting a drug or alcohol problem, encountering racial prejudice. Berman points out that nearly everyone has difficulty talking or writing about such issues because they arouse shame and tend to be enshrouded in secrecy and silence. This is especially true for college students, who are just emerging from adolescence and find themselves at institutions that rarely promote self-disclosure.

Recognizing the controversial nature of his subject, Berman confronts academic opposition to personal writing head on. He also discusses the similarities between the "writing cure" and the "talking cure," the role of the teacher and audience in the self-disclosing classroom, and the pedagogical strategies necessary to minimize risk, including the importance of empathy and other befriending skills.

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Storytelling in Alcoholics Anonymous

A Rhetorical Analysis

George H. Jensen

Southern Illinois University Press, 2000

Based on an ethnographic study spanning four years, George H. Jensen’s Storytelling in Alcoholics Anonymous: A Rhetorical Analysis calls upon Bakhtinian theory to analyze storytelling in AA.

Jensen introduces his study with an analysis of “Bill W.’s Story” as it appears in the first chapter of AA’s central text, Alcoholics Anonymous. Drawing on Walter Ong’s work on orality and literacy, he argues that “Bill W.’s Story” as it appears in print cannot fully capture the oral tradition of storytelling as it occurs in AA meetings.

In his first section, Jensen discusses storytelling as practiced by the Washingtonians, a temperance organization much like AA. He also discusses the influence of the Oxford Group’s (an international and interdenominational religious movement seeking to recapture the enthusiasm and dedication of first-century Christianity) spiritual program to the development of AA’s Twelve Steps. The remainder of the first section serves as an introduction of the culture of AA to outsiders.

In the second section, Jensen covers Bakhtin’s theory of the relationship between the author and the hero of a text, using Lillian Roth’s autobiographies as counterexamples of AA talks. He devotes an entire chapter in this section to explaining how AA meetings provide an example of what Bakhtin meant by carnival, a process through which humor, irony, and parody supply a mechanism for questioning commonly held beliefs. He shows how newcomers to AA move away from their egocentric personae as practicing alcoholics to adopt a new identity within AA. Drawing further on Bakhtin, he examines the autobiographical moments of AA talks, stressing that these moments never become fully autobiographical. AA talks, Jensen argues, are fragmented, yet achieve coherence through the interweaving of two important chronotopes. Finally, using Bakhtin’s discussion of heroes in autobiography, Jensen discusses the kinds of heroes one typically finds in AA talks.

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