From communicating to others to communicating to self: Doctoral thesis writing as therapy
Tomi Kallio, Pori University Consortium
Johan Sandström, Örebro University
Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation. Graham Greene in “Ways of escape” (1980)
As illustrated by Graham Greene above, there are some very fundamental reasons for writing in general. In this paper, we focus on motives behind writing a doctoral dissertation in the field of organizations and sustainable development. This field of study is also the field of study for both of us. It was our field during doctoral studies and it has been our field ever since, even though this paper is based on reflections upon our respective dissertation process. To us, at that time, Greene’s therapeutic dimension was not so apparent. We rather had our minds set on the more generic motives behind writing a doctoral dissertation.
However, it has become clear to us that writing-for-self was a more important aspect of our studies than we earlier had thought. There is often an ambition on behalf of the student to communicate to someone else (businesses, managers, politicians, other policy-makers, colleagues at the university, etc.) the ‘wrongs’ and ‘ways out’ of organizational abuse and misuse of nature, humans and society. In our respective doctoral studies, we were not able to really come to grasp with why we pursued writing a doctoral dissertation. If we would like to change the world, why write such a thing when most time is spent in solitude, reading and writing? Why not focus our time on working for an environmental Non-Governmental Organization (NGO)? Maybe we thought that our respective publications would have an impact, and maybe they have on someone, but in retrospect, it seemed as if something important was missing from our set of motives. This something has come to evolve around ourselves; not around those who we thought we would change, or communicate with. It is also this aspect that we felt was not acknowledged by us, or any other scholar around us, at the time. This is also the aspect that we suggest is lacking in discussions about the writing of a dissertation on organizations and sustainable development and which by bringing to the surface might actually improve the doctoral process.
In this paper we took our reflections to the field. We account for a group interview conducted with six doctoral students in the field of organizations and sustainable development. This group of students seemed to confirm the ‘communication with self’ (Broms & Gahmberg, 1983) experiences from writing a doctoral dissertation in the field, but it also raised some additional issues. Addressing the question of how we can understand this, we introduce the work on autocommunication by the Soviet semiotic, Yuri M Lotman [1922-1993]. Through Lotman’s (1977; 1990) work we outline one conceptual idea on how to make sense of our experiences and observations, and in the implications we suggest that our results might help make therapeutic autocommunication a more explicit and acknowledged part of the writing, teaching and supervising processes in the field of organizations and sustainable development.