Writing and reflexivity: Training to facilitate creative writing for personal development

This chapter reports on a research project which draws on work for assessment of students who took the Postgraduate Diploma in Creative Writing and Personal Development at the University of Sussex during the academic years 1998-99 and 1999-2000. It suggests that the autobiographical creative writing exercises undertaken by some of these students in small group work has enabled them to move from a singular sense of self towards a more multiple, reflexive sense of self, and that this can provide a useful training for undertaking the facilitation of writing groups in therapeutic contexts. The findings are interpreted using a range of theories of the self drawn from psychodynamics, neurophysiology and developmental psychology.