Author: Holly Hershman
Hershman, Holly, 2025 Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear: Reflections on an autofictional writing cure, Flinders University, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
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The 21st century has seen growing scholarship in the creative writing for personal development field, with a focus upon therapeutic writing forms such as journalling, expressive writing, and creative writing. However, this field is yet to explore the therapeutic potential of autofiction, a traditionally French genre that involves fictionalisation of the self by bridging writing about life through facts with phantasm. I argue that due to the hybrid nature of autofiction, authors can explore the phantasmic while re-authoring the self. Autofiction also creates a safe narrative distance which encourages deep self-exploration and enables a clearer understanding of identity to emerge than in non-fiction genres.
Drawing on the principles of Michael White’s conception of narrative therapy, I argue that by putting a personal story on a page, authors are, consistent with the first stage of narrative therapy, externalizing themselves as characters that can be deployed in changing settings and events. In writing about the self through autofiction, authors are empowered to choose how they wish to re-author their stories, mining their past, imagination and phantasmic ideas that might reveal deeper emotional truths beyond purely empirical ones.
With reference to practice led research, textual case studies and interviews with authors, I explore how in re-authoring stories, authors play with what psychologist Jerome Bruner refers to as the landscape of action, involving the plot and setting and the landscape of consciousness or identity, involving deeper psychological elements such as sharing of hopes and dreams through character, voice, fiction and language. It is through making these choices that writers develop their stories, which can result in new understandings of self, or therapeutic benefits. I also argue that with respect to writing in autofiction, there is a third landscape, the landscape of phantasm which enables authors to draw upon the phantasmic in re-authoring the self.
Leading scholars in the creative writing for personal development field such as Celia Hunt have primarily used student surveys to explore the therapeutic benefits of creative writing. The contribution of this thesis is not only the connection made between writing autofiction and the narrative therapy process, but also the use of textual evidence and literary analysis to support arguments about the therapeutic potential of autofiction. This enables a focus on specific instances where narrative techniques facilitate deeper exploration of the narrative therapy landscapes of action and identity as well as a newly formed landscape of phantasm. I argue that it is in these instances that authors deepen their understanding of self and story, working towards a new understanding of the writing cure.
Keywords: autofiction, narrative therapy, landscape of action, landscape of consciousness, phantasm, memoir, creative writing for personal development, writing as therapy
Subject: Creative Arts thesis
Thesis type: Doctor of Philosophy
Completed: 2025
School: College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Supervisor: Sean Williams