Writer's block.

A fter writing nearly 70 Perspectives, it was bound to happen; it seems I have hit " writer's block. " This is the first time I sat down to write my monthly essay in over 8 months and I decided to use the occasion to familiarize myself with this condition (and try to liberate myself from it). Writer's block varies in intensity from extreme (abandoning one's career as an author—think Harper Lee and Ralph Ellison) to trivial and temporary (which I hope mine is). Why worry? Most writers have it at one time or another. The most common causes cited for writer's block are lack of inspiration , illness, depression, financial pressure, and a sense of failure. None of these apply to me. In my case, maybe it is just good old academic pressure. With increasing frequency, I hear that the only part of AJNR that our subscribers read is my Perspectives , to which I say: What about the rest of the Journal? That is where most of my energy and time are spent! And, if our readers are paying that much attention to my short essays, should each one be better than the last? Writer's block sounds like the ideal excuse to avoid thinking about what to write (just look at the title of my first reference: " Writer's Block as an Instrument for Remaining in Paradise "). 1 Writer's block is a modern notion, and the term was coined in 1947 by Dr Edmund Bergler, a famous Austrian psychiatrist living in New York City. 2 Today, it is well accepted that the notion of writer's block arose in conjunction with the sudden prestige of psychiatry in the United States after World War II. Dr Bergler, a follower of Freud, blamed writer's block on oral masochism and a milk-denying mother (that gives me something to think about because I know that I was bottle-fed!), in addition to other " phallic and anal " explanations along Freudian lines. Stress leads to panic, and some scientists believe that the reticular activating system in the brain stem will shift higher functions associated with writing from the cortex to the limbic system under duress. 3 Others disagree and think that the creative writing process starts at the level of the limbic system, whereas more technical writing is initially fueled by the frontal cortex. If both were true, all writing would stop as …