Poetry and Psychoanalysis

The Opening of the Field

David Shaddock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000071337
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Psychiatry & Mental Health

Poetry and Psychoanalysis: The Opening of the Field provides a guide to applying a poet's imagination and precision of language to the healing endeavours of psychoanalysis while making a lucid journey through 2, 000 years of transformative poetry from Virgil, Dante and Blake to the contemporary poet Claudia Rankine.

Patients enter treatment with the hope of being recognized and the hope for transformation of a painful experience. David Shaddock shows how poetry can guide psychoanalysts towards meeting that hope. The book is based on the proposition that an accurate recognition of what is leads to the opening of what could be. The imaginative space that opens between poem and reader or therapist and patient can be a place of healing and transformation.

Poetry and Psychoanalysis will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists interested in using literature and creativity as inspiration for both their clinical work and personal growth, as well as all who love poetry.

Part I

Chapter 1
The poetics of psychoanalytic treatment

Several years ago at a psychoanalytic conference, I heard George Atwood (1997), who works with a very disturbed client population, discuss the difficulty of accepting a psychotic patient’s statement, “I am dead.” It is so easy to miss the patient’s attempts to communicate poetically what is otherwise incommunicable. If we listen poetically, it is not, or not only, the conviction of nonexistence that the statement communicates. Our imagination supplies a shared sense of what this statement omits, a pulsing, thwarted desire to be alive, truncated by the monosyllabic rhythm of the statement, a three-note descent to the portals of hell: “I am dead.”

As a psychotherapist who is also a poet, I often think of the similarities between my two endeavors. Psychoanalysis has long been a source for literary interpretation. In this chapter, I propose to reverse the direction of inquiry and look at analytic treatment through the lens of four topics in poetics: metaphor, image, sound and rhythm and form. I will conclude with a discussion of the way an ear for poetry informed my treatment of Lisa, a 36-year-old patient who had an extremely traumatic childhood.

The therapist’s two primary activities, listening to patients and making interpretations, are both abetted by a poet’s sensibility. There is a strong resemblance between the kind of alert reverie one falls into under the spell of a poem – combining both a heightened sense of meaning and the lulling trance of sound and rhythm – and the way one listens to both the content and the nonverbal aspects of patients’ communication. Effective interpretations draw on the same language skills – concision, clarity, allusiveness – that inform the best poems.

But the analogy goes farther than that. The intersubjective field a poem creates between writer and reader, a field of language charged with meaning, bears a strong resemblance to the language-mediated intersubjective field (Atwood and Stolorow, 1984) created by the analyst and patient. A successful poem, like a successful interpretation (Stolorow, 1993), creates a sense of intersubjective relatedness. Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney quotes Jorge Luis Borges to advance this view of poetry: “Poetry lies in the meeting of poem and reader, not in the lines and symbols printed on pages of a book. What is essential is… the thrill, the almost physical emotion that comes with each reading” (1995, p. 8).

Poets often make the argument that poetry can provide a cure for despair and isolation. William Carlos Williams writes, “It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there” (1962, pp. 161–162). Adrienne Rich writes that “Poetry can break open locked chambers of possibility, restore numbed zones of feeling, recharge desire” (1993, p. xiv). In providing a bridge between subjective worlds, poetry is inherently a blow against what Stolorow and Atwood (1992) call “the myth of the isolated mind.” How can therapists tap into this curative power?

The poetry therapy movement has argued for the inclusion of poetry in the therapy process. Theodore Reik has argued for “a poetic approach to depth psychology. The psychologist should be like an actor who learns technique only to forget it once he is on stage” (1968, p. 6). What I propose here is not to make therapy more “poetic” but to extend our understanding of the therapy process by looking at it through the lens of poetics.

Metaphor

I begin with metaphor because it is so central to the creation of a sense of intersubjective relatedness. The word metaphor’s origin in the Greek metapherein, to transfer, reveals its essential task: to transfer objects from the external world into the world of the poem. Metaphors exist in the transitional space (Winnicott, 1971a) between object and subject. As the critic Northrup Frye points out:

literature always assumes, in its metaphors, a relation between human consciousness and its natural environment that passes beyond – in fact, outrages and violates – the ordinary common sense based on a permanent separation of subject and object.

(1990a, p. 71)

This violation of the boundaries between object and subject is analogous to Kohut’s (1966) description of the artist’s sense of complete oneness with objects in his environment: “Like the air which we breathe, they are most clearly experienced at the moment of union with the self” (p. 255).

When Homer (1990), in Book 8 of the Iliad, compares the watchfires of the Greek and Trojan armies to “Stars in the night sky glittering/round the moon’s brilliant blaze in all their glory/when the air falls to a sudden, windless calm” (p. 249), he is linking his empathic understanding of the soldiers’ experience of a calm night before battle to the reader’s experience of the awe and terror a still, clear night can inspire. Stars and watchfires, objects in the natural world, have been transferred into the intersubjective field of the poem. We do not read poetry primarily as evidence of the poet’s strange or enlightened consciousness; we read poetry to leave our own isolation and enter a communal world based on shared meanings.

Our patients’ metaphoric communications are often unelaborated or merely alluded to. When Atwood’s patient says to him “I am dead,” there is an implied comparison of a completely alienated self-state and a corpse. Ironically, this metaphor of a corpse in the room, with its coldness and stench, is a living conduit through which a moment of intersubjective relatedness flows.

A metaphoric interpretation can similarly create intersubjective conjunction. In interpreting a patient’s description of continually returning with new hope to her intrusive and narcissistic mother, only to be disappointed again, I said, “It’s like a piece of candy with a delicious chocolate coating, but a center you don’t like; you think you can just eat the chocolate, but somehow the filling, no matter how little you actually bite into it, ends up dominating the taste.” The candy metaphor comes to stand for my understanding of her relationship with her mother: the arousal in the anticipation of getting her needs met, the hope that she can somehow master the relationship and just “bite deep enough” and the way disappointment comes to dominate the experience like an underlying flavor that lasts in the mouth. But the metaphor is more than just a shorthand referent to a complex pathological tie. If I have made a successful interpretation, it is my own knowledge of hunger and disappointment that I have communicated.

Metaphors are an example of what contemporary psychoanalysts (e.g., Ogden, 1995) describe as an emergent third. It emerges between object and subject or between two subjects. The watchfires/night sky metaphor becomes a third, a common fate both Greeks and Trojans are under. The candy metaphor I offer my patient reorganizes our work. We are now the people who understand her relationship to her mother in this particular way.

A retreat from poetry: concretization and reification

Both therapists and patients are likely to retreat from the shared conjunction of metaphorical space into the relative safety of the literal and concrete. In this, they are enacting, or reenacting, a retreat from a self sustained by selfobject relationships into a self sustained by concretization and reification. Such a retreat accomplishes two goals. It shores up a shakily organized subjective world and it withdraws from a potentially disappointing relationship into the protection of a separate and inviolable belief in the objective reality of one’s thoughts and feelings (Stolorow, Brandchaft, and Atwood, 1987). Concretization is a universal hallmark of subjective experience, but it comes to dominate psychic organization when “early, validating responsiveness has been consistently absent or grossly unreliable” (p. 133). Then a retreat to the literal, or to the compulsive, as in psychosexual enactments, dominates and isolates psychic life. One way of understanding the therapy process is to see it as elevating concretizations into metaphors, vehicles of shared understanding. Adequate therapeutic treatment lifts the patient’s communications out of their literal heaviness and lets them “float” in the room as mutually held conduits for understanding. In this sense a life of rigidly held, even delusional, beliefs, a life of compulsive sexual enactments or psychosomatizations, is a life without poetry. And from my perspective as poet and therapist, I would add it is a life in search of poetry – of a metaphor replete with shared meanings.

If patients are prone to reduce metaphors to the literal, therapists are prone to move in the opposite direction, to elevate metaphors into reified universal truths. Reification involves a withdrawal from the poetic, from the intersubjective. To speak of a patient’s Oedipus complex as something that exists as an entity is to withdraw from the intersubjective power of metaphor, as when a patient’s description of being “shot down” when he asked his father for a loan interacts with the therapist’s own construction of meanings (based perhaps on trace memories of his own childhood shame and rage, his reading in a college survey course of Sophocles’s shocking play, his reading of Freud and subsequent theorists). The reification of metaphors withdraws them from the intersubjective field and coats them with a kind of pseudoscientific Teflon. Metaphors, on the other hand, are adhesive: they draw meanings to them.

Image

Image differs from metaphor by virtue of the lack of intent behind it. Whereas a metaphor carries the intent of the maker to communicate his or her subjectivity, an image stands alone. It is the act of perception itself that infuses an image with subjective meaning. “Images haunt,” writes the poet Robert Hass. “Images are not quite ideas; they are stiller than that, with less implication outside themselves. And they are not myth, they do not have that explanatory power; they are closer to pure story” (1984, p. 275).

Hass’s notion that images are closer to pure story is very relevant to our understanding of a patient’s retrieval of powerful images from dreams, from memory or from intensely felt daily perceptions. In the first dream reported by a young male patient suffering from obsessive thoughts about his own well-being as well as elaborate compulsive rituals, he described “Huge boulders. They’re not moving but there’s a sense of danger, like we could be crushed at any moment. My father is with me.” It was enormously tempting to interpret these boulders, to convert them to metaphors. But to do so would be to lose the narrative force that they could communicate: “I am in terrible danger from something overwhelmingly heavy. My father is with me, but he’s in danger too.” Of course, I am integrating these boulders into my own subjective schema, imagining them to be symbols of the way masculinity was crushed in my patient’s household by the cold, critical mother he has just begun talking about. Such organizing activity, however necessary to the therapy process, is a step away from a moment of intersubjective relatedness of shared perception the image affords: boulders.

Sound and rhythm

The last twenty years or so have seen a marked increase in interest in non-verbal forms of communication in psychotherapy (Stern et al., 1998). This thinking focuses on the patient’s nonverbal communication of affect-states and on the way the therapist’s nonverbal responses influence the patient’s sense of attachment. Confirmation that intersubjective relatedness is woven from sounds and rhythm comes from infant research (Stern, 1985; Beebe and Lachmann, 1992, 2002). These researchers found caregivers conveying affect-attunement by mirroring the rhythm and tone of the infant’s expressions. Similarly, affect regulation was achieved by “changing the music” and replaying it with a different rhythm or intensity. Knoblauch (2000) sees a strong analogy between the therapy process and the improvisational dialog of jazz. What light can an understanding of the “music” of poetry shed on this inquiry?

Ezra Pound defined three sources of poetry’s power. Along with the play of meanings in the words themselves (which Pound called logopoeia) and the play of images we have just discussed (which Pound called phanopoeia), he described “melopoeia: wherein the words are charged, over and above their plain meaning, with some musical property, which directs the bearing or trend of that meaning” (1968, p. 25).

It would seem at first glance that this melopoeia would have the least applicability to psychotherapy of the poetic concepts; after all, it is the poet’s intention to charge his language with melody and rhythm, while everyday discourse, including therapeutic discourse, is free of this intention. However, when we understand that sound and rhythm are among the primary ways poetry connects subjective worlds, their relevance is more apparent. Pound describes melopoeia as having “a contrary current, a force tending to lull or distract the reader from the exact sense of the language. It is poetry on the borders of music and music is perhaps the bridge between consciousness and the unthinking sentient or even insentient universe” (p. 26). When William Blake writes “Ah Sun-flower, weary of time,/Who countest the steps of the sun,” a prime source of the poem’s meaning comes from the way the elongated vowels of pure longing in the first line bu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Part I
• Part II
• References
• Index