The medical literature contains these two excessively brief accounts of self-treatment for the ailment known as “writer’s block”. Each can be downloaded in its entirety, in PDF form:
1. “The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of a Case of ‘Writer’s Block‘” Dennis Upper, Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 1974 Fall; 7(3): 497. (Thanks to Eric Geigle for bringing this to our attention.) The author was at the Veterans Administration Hospital, Brockton, Massachusetts. The paper is blank.
2. “A Multisite Cross-Cultural Replication of Upper’s (1974) Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of Writer’s Block,” Robert Didden, Jeff Sigafoos, Mark F. O’Reilly, Giulio E Lancioni and Peter Sturmey, Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 2007 Winter; 40(4): 773. The authors, respectively at Radboud University Nijmegen, University of Tasmania, University of Texas at Austin, University of Bari, and at Queens College, City University of New York, replicate Upper’s finding.