My Marmalade Passion—Or, Remembering Proust's Gloves: Poetry, Creativity, and the Unconscious

This essay was originally commissioned in late 2009 by fellow poet Jacqueline Saphra, who was guest-editing issue forty-six of the UK poetry journal Magma. My understanding of trauma theory—and its connections to my own creative practice—have deepened considerably over the intervening years, and I've often been tempted to rework this essay to incorporate my greater knowledge of the subject. However, I've concluded that this essay is not dissimilar to any one of the poems I wrote around the same time: in many ways both are a record of the person I was then, so to try and radically revise either would be disingenuous, and likely not to succeed.

I think, anyway, that the overall thrust of this piece still holds true, and I know a number of people have found it useful over the years. The original context of this essay does need to be borne in mind though. Although my friend Helen Mort, a Professor of Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University, regularly recommends it to her PhD students, it was written primarily for a poetry-reading and poetry-writing audience, and not for people in university settings. Nor was it written for therapists and clinicians. It is very much not an academic article, but rather a personal exploration of the overlaps between the two main parts of my professional life. As such, it has a lot in common with a poem, in that its main purpose is to prompt felt responses and reflection in the reader, not to persuade them to accept a carefully worked-through argument and its conclusion. Apart from a few minor edits, it is presented here as it originally appeared in Magma 46, which was published in spring 2010.

Art is a revelation, not a criticism.

(W. B. Yeats, “The Body of the Father Christian Rosencrux”—from his collection of essays Ideas of Good and Evil)

Enquiry into the unconscious has been my business for the best part of two decades: the job title “psychotherapist” has been applicable to a lot of my work during this

time,