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As I was reading Robert Lundquist's paper, I was reminded that recently a colleague used these words to describe another paper: “It is as much poem as analytic piece.” And I wrote back:
I want to say a little more about this, the matter of ‘the poem.' I think it is all ‘a poem’—life, the universe, psychoanalysis of whatever flavor. Or, it is if or when we know how to look for it. There was a delicious moment Friday morning with someone who consults me over the telephone, a writer describing what she experienced as a difficult scene with her young adult son, an odd interaction at the resolving edge of a critical period in their lives, and I suddenly saw the poem in it, and parsed it for her. Dubious at first, she was eventually persuaded to see it as well, and it changed her feeling about herself. What I understood in that moment was that in this work that I do, I am a reader. Not a therapist, not an analyst, not anything in those clunky terms; a reader.
What I want most is to invite our colleagues to think about themselves in some of the ways that Robert Lundquist does. To my mind, the heart of Robert Lundquist's piece resides in the phrase “How can we, how do we, understand something when we are on the inside of it…?” Robert has written this very much from the inside; he is showing us what his inside looks like.
Some of his words draw particular appreciation. “My lack of critical capacity,” for example, points to an absence of objectified distance, of preconception, and judgment. He writes it as “lack,” perhaps anticipating a clinically based assessment of “deficiency.” Yet, as we attune ourselves to his way of thinking, it begins to look more and more like freedom. “The thoughts I am experiencing are poetry” bespeaks a careful welcoming of thought as an honored guest. “I would sit at a desk day after day, reading poems and waiting.” Here is a suggestive parallel with psychoanalytic listening, yet the perspective is so different from what we