Therapist As Muse

While struggling to determine if psychotherapy was helping or hurting her writing, Meredith Turtis talked to other writers about their own experiences in therapy:

Jennifer Egan, who dedicated her Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit From the Goon Squad to her therapist, “Peter M.,” told me that she couldn’t have written the book without him. “Therapy offered freedom from an endless repetition of neurosis-driven thoughts and ideas,” she said in an email. “I feel that my writing range broadened as a result; it’s as if a whole landscape opened up that had been invisible to me before, sealed as I was inside my echo chamber of worries and fear and guilt.”