Critical Expressivism- Theory and Practice in the Composition Classroom, 2014a

Wilson
Elbow didn’t just introspect in order to arrive at the principles that student
writers must observe: he proposed a form of introspection as the means by which
each individual student writer might “learn the process for himself” (1973, p.
15).
Ten years after Elbow’s Writing Without Teachers, Murray would suggest in
Teaching the Other Self: The Writer’s First Reader that the point of the writing
conference was not to examine the student text, but to interact with the introspecting
student—the “other self” created by the student’s introspection. Murray
claimed that the writer must be his own reader, and that in reading his own
writing, he forms two distinct selves: the first self who writes; and the “other
self” who reads, counsels, advises, and navigates the territory mapped out by the
writing for the first self. The other self also introspects: “the other self articulates
the process of writing” (Murray, 1982, p. 142).
Lest we confuse an articulation of the process of writing with a purely behavioral
description of what the writer does, Murray assured us that the teacher
must first acknowledge and respond to the writer’s descriptions of his feelings as
he writes (1982, p. 145). The writer needs this other self to develop and grow,
and the teacher can help make this growth possible simply by encouraging, expecting,
and listening to the other self speak.
FROM INTROSPECTION TO FREUD: LAYERS OF SELF
Despite my fear that Watson had littered the pages of history with the corpses
of mind and consciousness, introspection was clearly alive and well in the
1970s and 1980s, at least in composition studies. Introspection might have fallen
out of vogue in the wake of behaviorism, but the “interior view” of the introspectionists
had survived and been nurtured elsewhere while it waited for Elbow
and Murray to surface anew as spokespersons. While writing process movement
founders such as Murray, Elbow, and Emig never drew directly on Titchener’s
work or mention the method of introspection, they drew consciously on Freud’s
work. Three years after Murray proposed nurturing the student writer’s “other
self,” Janet Emig described the multiple selves—or multiple layers of self—that
must be attended to by the writing teacher. Her version of Murray’s “other self”
had a Freudian twist: the writing teacher must nurture the student’s unconscious
self.
Rather than dividing the writer into two separate selves as Murray did, she
divided the self into layers. These layers first take the form of skin in her opening
startling and wonderful image of the writer who has dutifully produced “the
conscious student theme” (1983, p. 46):
178