Splitting in unsent letters: writing as a social practice and a psychological activity

Abstract

This article draws on an analysis of unsent letters to explore the scope of psychoanalytic ideas in historical work on subjectivity. In so doing, it comments on recent directions in cultural history, particularly the confusion which currently surrounds concepts such as 'identity' and 'subjectivity'. Subjectivity in personal writing, it argues, is construed not only through narrative forms and the social practices of writing. It also concerns unconscious motivations, and how these are expressed in language. Writing itself does not create subjectivity; rather, it provides evidence of complex negotiations between experience, internal states and their rendering through cultural forms. Unsent letters provide a means of illuminating such negotiations because, while formally addressed to another, they are often also quite revealing about internal processes. My case-study of these processes is the British management theorist, Lyndall Urwick, who wrote long and numerous drafts of unsent letters at crucial moments in his public career between the mid-1940s and the late 1950s. In these letters, Urwick draws on the vocabulary of public moralism to construct an account of his own and others' motives. Yet this social script was never wholly constitutive of his subjectivity. Urwick's unsent letters testify to feelings of omnipotence and despair which could only ever be partially managed by his writing. Using psychoanalytic concepts of splitting and projective identification, the article seeks to understand and illustrate the workings of the unconscious in his writing.