The Essence of, and Feeling Thought: Reflections on the Poetic, and the Analytic Process

I once heard a story that, at some point, and previous to writing Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett spent a considerable amount of time staring at his hands and saying, “I have nothing to say … I have nothing to say.” Currently I am experiencing a slightly different experience, but similar. My experience is more of a question, “Do I really have anything to say about the influence of contemporary art on contemporary psychoanalysis?” The answer is that I do not. But perhaps I have something to say about the process of being a poet and being an analyst. Art is a visceral experience for me; I understand art/poetry only in as much as I am able to feel it. I enjoy, which is a dubious choice of words, feeling the language, feeling themes of loss, grief, love, joy, etc., but again, what I am trying to emphasize is my lack of critical capacity. However, in feeling there is thought, and in thought there is feeling. Poetry, for me, as much of the analytic process, is implicitly and explicitly the essence of and feeling thought.

So. So I have been asking myself, How might I be helpful to further the understanding of, the process of, or influence of, art, specifically, the poetic process, on psychoanalysis? What I realize is that perhaps I have something to say about a particular dilemma that I think we are faced with as contemporary analysts, and the dilemma is, How can we, how do we, understand something when we are on the inside of it: the inside of the analytic dyad, the inside of the implicit and explicit and systemic contexts in which the analytic dyad is immersed? For this is something that I think the poetic process has in common with the analytic process. In the poetic process, one is immersed in the contextual experience of