THE DOCTOR IS IN

If you will be in the NYC area on Monday, 10/20 and/or Tuesday, 10/21, please stop by Bluestockings Bookstore (Monday) or KGB Bar (Tuesday) and hear me read, along with Caroline Grant, Elrena Evans, Jennifer Cognard-Black and Nicole Cooley, from our essays in the anthology Mama, PhD: Women Write about Motherhood and Academic Life.

SELF-DOUBT: THE UP SIDE

Last week, I had lunch with two writer friends whose work I admire. In the midst of a discussion about book sales, writer A stated that she thought her books had done well because they were cleverly marketed. "They do well because you're a good writer," B corrected her. "The marketing just makes people aware of them."

"No," A said. "I'm really not that good."

B and I stared at her, then peppered her with questions designed to uncover what she really meant by that statement. She couldn't have meant it literally, we assumed, because it was so clearly absurd.

She did mean it, though. Despite excellent reviews and sales, and sincere admiration from her peers, she doesn't think she's a very good writer.

She doesn't suffer from an "inferiority complex." She knows she is highly intelligent, competent, attractive, and engaging. She is assertive in both the professional and personal spheres. She just doesn't think she writes that well.

A few days later, another friend, C, described an interaction in which a colleague showed himself to be both unscrupulous and self-righteous. C compared this individual to the loathesome Aunt Reed in Jane Eyre. "He's so comfortable with himself," C observed. "I stay up at night torturing myself over minor transgressions that aren't going to affect anybody anyway, while he seems to believe he's a great person because he tips his doorman and doesn't beat his kids."

Both of these incidents reminded me of my experience as a beginning therapist in graduate school. Many of my peers appeared supremely confident of their ability to deal with people in pain and distress; to address their issues competently and smoothly. I was terrified. I loved listening to my clients; the stories I heard engaged my imagination and sympathy. But I had no confidence that my interventions were accurate or helpful, and I frequently communicated my doubts to my supervisors.

The result was that two of my internship recommendation letters, while otherwise glowing, mentioned professional insecurity and unfounded feelings of incompetence. I found this out during an internship interview, when the interviewer quoted the passages to me.

"Do you think these are accurate statements?" he asked.

This was not a question I'd prepared for. As often happens when I'm put on the spot, I blurted out exactly what I thought. "I don't believe anyone at my level of training is qualified for this work," I said. "I know we have to get experience somehow, but frankly, at this point I think we're all mental health hazards."

My interviewer smiled. "That's what I imagined," he said. "You have older student syndrome."

He went on to explain that a body of psychological research was building that seemed to indicate a negative correlation between level of experience or skill and self-assessment of competence. "Beginners learn a little bit and assume that's all there is to know," he said. I, on the other hand, had worked in a number of fields, including mental health, before returning to graduate school, and perhaps had a greater appreciation of the complexities and pitfalls involved in the work. "I've observed this before," he said. "The interns with the greatest degree of confidence in their work invariably turn out to have the most to learn." Once the newbies began acquiring more sophisticated skills and understanding, their self-assessment tended to lose its shine.

I have since learned that this phenomenon is called the Dunning-Kruger effect. Although the research, as far as I know, is confined to the measurement of self-evaluation of competence in a narrow range of concrete skills, the principle seems to apply to more amorphous areas, such as ethics and art.

Committed artists, and those of us who strive to be good people (however we define this), may be especially vulnerable to negative self-assessment, because there is no objective yardstick against which to measure our performance. We may conclude, accurately, that our efforts fail to measure up to those of George Eliot or Gandhi. Most of us can live with that. But there is no cutoff line for "good" or even "good enough" writing or behavior, so for some of us, the more earnestly we apply ourselves, the more daunting the task appears.

Of course, the effect is neither universal nor infallible. There are great artists who are supremely self-confident, even arrogant, about the quality of their work, and there are those whose humility is entirely justified. But those of us who agonize over the right word or action, and who are haunted by that inner voice insisting that our work is crap or that we ourselves are selfish and despicable might draw some comfort from the reflection that this self-excoriation may be a sign that we're actually doing pretty well.

Susan O'Doherty, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist with a New York City-based practice. A fiction writer herself, she specializes in issues affecting writers and other creative artists. Her book,  Getting Unstuck Without Coming Unglued: A Woman's Guide to Unblocking Creativity (Seal, 2007) is now available in bookstores. Send your questions to her at Dr.Sue at mindspring dot com.

Comments

[J.C. Hutchins]

Susan, this is an awesome post; very illuminating, resonating and inspiring. Thanks so much for sharing this.

As an artist who fits the "Writer A" mold in your post, I now feel a little better about lugging around my own self-doubt. Let us all hope that "we're actually doing pretty well," like you suggest.

Keep up the excellent work!

[Emil]

I came here via the link JC Hutchins posted on Twitter. Though not a writer myself, I can identify with this post in the way I feel about my photography. Thank you for writing this!

[Katharine Weber]

Very interesting issues raised here, as always, Sue, for this writer to think about. Of course the individual who comes to mind in a nightmarish way when you describe the "negative correlation between level of experience or skill and self-assessment of competence" is Sarah Palin. She exemplifies your teacher's point: "Beginners learn a little bit and assume that's all there is to know."

[Sarah]

Susan- thanks for the great post. I had a similar experience in my spiritual-direction training- "Who am I to do this work?". A wise, elderly nun, someone who radiated a sense of God's presence, told us "the longer I seek the answers, the greater the mystery becomes." She also admonished us not to let our self-doubt keep us from "doing the work" in a kind of reverse hubris, saying that perfection is not required of us, only effort. That message really helped me when I wrote my novel!

[T]

Thanks, Sue. Good post. Good reminder.

[Rosemary Carstens]

Thank you so much for this encouraging post. And thanks also to Sarah for her remarks. I found both inspiring and thought to myself, "I know I'm not perfect, but I can keep on keeping on--and I will!" Rosemary Carstens - http://artistspotlight.blogspot.com

[Sarah]

I just had to revisit this post because this one line kept coming back to me: "Committed artists, and those of us who strive to be good people (however we define this), may be especially vulnerable to negative self-assessment, because there is no objective yardstick against which to measure our performance." But yet, the marketplace does appear to provide an "objective yardstick", one that is hard to ignore or explain away if we fail to "measure up"- so while self-doubt is based on a subjective evaluation, is also subject to an external evaluation that can feed the self-doubt, if we let it. The same with being "good people"- there are external forces that are more than happy to tell you whether or not you are "good enough", not the least of these being religion. I'm not saying we should let these forces determine our self-worth- only that they are a strong factor in the whole self-doubt struggle.