Writer's block, the bane of every creative's existence (just ask Alan Wake). Its name ties it to the process of writing, but the condition applies to any form of creative work. It's commonly believed to be a lack of energy, but more often it comes down to how much energy is being spent on a given piece, and where. Freud's terms cathexis and anticathexis describe the spending of that energy, and the Kabbalistic Tree of Life gives us a map of where it all happens.

Edmund Bergler coined "writer's block" in New York in 1947. He was an Austrian psychoanalyst and a follower of Freud, and he classed the condition as psychic masochism: an unconscious wish to sabotage your own conscious goals and to take pleasure in the failure. Bergler claimed to have treated more than forty blocked writers and cured every last one of them. He also published twenty-five books and 273 scholarly articles of his own, so whatever he was diagnosing, he clearly didn't have it.

The term outlived the theory. Most writers who use it have never heard Bergler's explanation, and frankly, they're better off. Still, the term came out of a psychoanalytic frame, and Freud's own model of psychic energy explains the condition far better than his disciple did. That model turns on two words: cathexis and anticathexis.

As a self-described Jungian, I realize it may seem strange for me to be discussing an idea that originates with Freud and his questionable theories. I'll admit that parts of this have merit, though, and as a writer, I have struggled with this beast time and again.

Freud's word for this was Besetzung. In plain German, it can mean the occupation of a town by troops (yikes). In a letter to Ernest Jones, Freud had used the English word "interest." James Strachey translated it as "cathexis" for the Standard Edition, building the word from a Greek verb meaning "to occupy."

A cathexis is a quantity of psychic energy attached to an idea, a person, or an object. Freud borrowed from banking here, comparing that quantity to an investment. To cathect something is to station energy there.

Much like America runs on Dunkin', writing runs on cathexis. An idea has to carry a charge before it pulls your hand toward the page. A character has to carry one before you'll follow her through a scene. Freud even described thinking itself as an experiment run on small amounts of cathexis, like a wargamer pushing miniatures around the table to see how a move plays out before committing to it.

Freud's counterpart term is Gegenbesetzung, a counter-occupation, which Strachey translated as "anticathexis." If cathexis is the energy you station on an idea, anticathexis is the energy the mind spends to keep a charged idea out of consciousness. The troops are still there but they're just facing the other way.

In "The Unconscious" (1915), Freud treats anticathexis as the sole mechanism behind primal repression. He describes it as a permanent expenditure: it pays for the repression, and it keeps it in place. Repression is continuous pressure in the direction of the unconscious. The repressed idea keeps its charge and keeps pushing, so the defense has to be paid for every single day it remains.

Freud also proposed that the energy for the barrier often comes from the very idea being repressed. The charge withdrawn from the idea becomes the force standing guard against it. The defense runs on what it holds back.

Freud addressed blocked writing directly in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926), where he defines an inhibition as a restriction of an ego function. His examples include playing the piano, walking, and writing. The ego gives up a function when using it would produce anxiety, or when it would bring the ego into conflict with the superego.

Freud traced these particular inhibitions to sexuality, because of course he did. The mechanism works without that reading (as most of his work should). Writing stops when writing comes to stand in for something the ego is defending against. It can be a sense of exposure: putting your internal world on the page for public consumption. It can be judgment from a parent, a teacher, or a reader whose opinion still carries weight. It could be an unfulfilled idea; an unwritten story is still perfect, while one that has gone to print is locked in, flaws and all. And of course, it could be the distance between the book in your head and the book that comes out. Any of these can charge the act of writing with enough anxiety for the ego to shut it down.

Freud describes a second mechanism in the same text. When the ego is tied up in a difficult psychic task, like grieving the death of someone close or the constant work of keeping a flood of fantasies in check, it loses so much of its available energy that it has to cut its spending everywhere at once. Your mind is spinning a dozen dirty plates, but none of them ever get cleaned. Or it's like a day trader buying small shares across the board and missing the one big play that would have built a solid nest egg.

Whichever mental image works for you, the result is the same. A blocked writer hasn't run out of energy, they've misplaced it among the pile of laundry they've been to depressed to take care of. Part of it charges the work, and part of it is posted against the work. When the two are close to equal, nothing moves.

Jung's model of psychic energy, laid out in "On Psychic Energy" (1928), borrows two principles from physics: equivalence and entropy. Equivalence says that energy leaving one place shows up somewhere else in the same amount. Entropy says that in a closed system, differences level out until the tension is gone and nothing moves. A block has both at work. The energy went somewhere else, and when the charges for and against the work even out, the tension goes slack. Without movement, there's a block.

I try to find balance in things, and I often think in terms of Yin and Yang: one cannot exist without the other. The true goal is the synthesis of the two. But equal parts lead to stagnation, and as my own writing keeps trying to express, stasis is not a solution. What you need is tension between these energies, like spinning magnets acting upon one another. Sometimes, you need a fulcrum to change your vector.

A writer has two options: weaken the anticathexis or strengthen the cathexis. Freewriting, lowered standards, and private drafts weaken the defense. Deadlines, research, reading, and talking about the work strengthen the charge. More often than not, the advice to "cure" a block takes one of these two forms.

Now we're going to leave the psychoanalytic world behind for something more mystical. The Kabbalistic Tree of Life is a diagram of ten sefirot joined by twenty-two paths. Add those together and you get thirty-two, matching the thirty-two paths of wisdom named in the opening line of the Sefer Yetzirah. The Tree shows how Ein Sof, the infinite, descends into the finite. Light enters at Keter, the crown, and passes down through the sefirot to Malkhut, the kingdom.

Kabbalists later layered the Tree across four worlds. Moses Cordovero elaborated them in Safed in the sixteenth century, and Isaac Luria refined them. Their names are drawn from Isaiah 43:7, in which God says he created, formed, and made. Each world holds a complete Tree of its own, and the Malkhut of one world serves as the Keter of the world below it. These four worlds map onto the stages of a piece of writing.

Atziluth, emanation, is the flash before language: an image, a mood, a conviction that something is there.

Beriah, creation, is the premise: the argument, the situation, the shape of the piece.

Yetzirah, formation, is the draft: scenes, sentences, the order of paragraphs.

Assiah, action, is the finished text, revised and sent out into the world.

The handoff from one Tree to the next works here as well. A finished premise is the seed of a draft, and a finished draft is the seed of the published piece.

A block can sit at any one of these junctions. A writer who can't begin is stuck between Atziluth and Beriah, with a flash that never takes shape. A writer with a premise and no pages is stuck between Beriah and Yetzirah. A writer with three hundred pages that don't come together is stuck inside Yetzirah. And a writer with a finished draft that never gets published is stuck at the door of Assiah. Four gates, each barring passage to the next, and each one calls for a different tack.

Isaac Luria (1534–1572), known as the Ari, taught in Safed, and his system rests on three ideas: tzimtzum, shevirat ha-kelim, and tikkun.

Tzimtzum is the process of contraction. Before creation, Ein Sof fills everything. If you want to make room for a world, the infinite has to withdraw and leave a void. So the process of creation begins with a withdrawal.

Light is then emanated into the void and poured into vessels, the kelim. The vessels can't contain it, and they shatter. This event is called shevirat ha-kelim, the breaking of the vessels. Most of the light returns to its source. The rest falls along with the shards, and sparks of it become trapped in klipot, husks or shells. The klipot have no light of their own; the holy sparks trapped inside them are what feed them and keep them strong.

Tikkun is repair: the work of freeing those sparks and raising them back toward their source. It happens through specific acts like prayer, study, and performing the mitzvot, the 613 commandments of the Torah, with kavanah, or intention. Luria's system also holds that no single person can recover all the sparks through their own effort. The repair is a collective job.

Appealing to a higher power is something many creatives do, though the form and function vary greatly. One person might pray regularly or attend Mass every week. Others take the route of psychoactive substances, or activities wholly unrelated to the task at hand. These can shake up a stale headspace and let fresh ideas flow, but done to excess, they can lead you further from your destination. Then there's the collective route Luria had in mind: an editor, a writing group, or a trusted reader who can see the sparks you can't.

Put Luria's ideas next to Freud's, and they line up with the economic model.

A klipah is an anticathexis. It's a shell around a charged thing, and it lives on the charge it holds. Freud's defense draws its energy from the idea it represses; the husk draws its strength from the spark it traps.

The breaking of the vessels matches Freud's account of how primal repression starts. In 1926, he proposed that the precipitating causes are most likely quantitative: an excess of excitation, and a breach of the shield that protects the mind against stimuli. The vessel breaks because the light is too strong for it. A writer can over-cathect a project the same way. A book asked to carry too much, like proof of a life's worth or an answer to a parent, breaks its vessel, and those pieces can get walled off.

Tzimtzum answers the over-charged project. The infinite withdraws to make room for something finite, and a writer can withdraw charge from the whole vision of the work to make room for one page that can actually exist. In Freud's vocabulary, this is a decathexis of the whole for the sake of the part.

I've experienced this myself. I spent so much energy creating that I filled all the available space. I spent weeks writing and building the framework around things without ever getting the thing itself done. It could even be argued that I'm distracting myself with this very article. My retort is that this is about refining my style and building skill, even if progress on the primary project isn't advancing as regularly as I'd like.

Tikkun is the practice that follows. Sparks are raised one at a time, through specific acts, and in writing, that specific act is the sentence. A blocked writer doesn't have to free every spark; Luria says no one can do that alone anyway. Like a line of dominoes, all it takes is a single freed spark to get things moving.

David Bakan argued in 1958 that Freud drew on Jewish mysticism, consciously or not, in building psychoanalysis. That particular claim is contested, though it wouldn't be the first or last time the psychological, the theological, and the philosophical shared a path. cough Jung cough The parallels between the husk and the anticathexis stand on their own either way.

Jung broke with Freud over libido. In the book first published in 1912 as Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, later revised as Symbols of Transformation, he treated libido as psychic energy in general rather than sexual energy alone. Score one for the Jungians. On Jung's terms, the energy a block ties up is the same energy that runs the rest of a writer's life.

Jung's essay "The Philosophical Tree," in volume 13 of his Collected Works, studies the tree as it appears in alchemy and in his patients' drawings. He reads the mandala as the self seen in cross-section, and the tree as the self seen in profile: the self as a process of growth. He also writes about the inverted tree of the East Siberian shamans, and the shaman who climbs that tree to find his true self in the upper world.

In emanation, the Kabbalistic Tree is read from the top down, with light descending from Keter to Malkhut. Tikkun runs the other way, raising the sparks back up. Writing follows that second direction. The flash may arrive in Atziluth, but the work gets done in Assiah, with a hand on a keyboard or a pen. Like Jung's shaman, the writer climbs from there.

To get yourself out of a creative rut, you only need to follow these maps. Find the world where the blockage has set up shop. Decide whether the work needs a weaker defense or a stronger charge. Withdraw from the whole of the vision and make room for one finite thing. Then raise a single spark. Tikkun begins in Assiah with a single act, and for a writer, that act is one sentence.

If only Alan Wake had had that advice in the first place, he wouldn't have spent 13 years at the bottom of a lake... or was it an ocean?