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Robert Pinsky (2008) notes that psychoanalysis and poetry share the understanding “that forgetting and remembering are interdependent parts of one process” (p. 1082), an observation that might stand as preface to Uta Gosmann's study of poetic memory in the work of Sylvia Plath, Susan Howe, Ellen Hinsey, and Louise Glück. In this study of four contemporary poets, Gosmann proposes the concept of poetic memory as a way of formulating an understanding of the poetic self or subject as permeable, open to the past in ways that go beyond the boundaries of an individual life or the documentary record of events.
How is a poem like an analysis? Each is an intersubjective encounter that occurs within a defined space. In the space of that encounter, whether it is the analytic session or the poem, the past makes itself heard in the voices of the present. In poetry, as in analytic work, language is not only the medium of expression, but the object of study, the focus of interest and awareness. For analyst and analysand, writer and reader, language is dense with meaning, in ways that no individual can ever control or exhaust.
A closer look at the kinship of poetry and psychoanalysis takes us into the realm of metaphor. Borbely (1998) develops a psychoanalytic conception of metaphor as an operation of mind that indicates freedom of movement, freedom to explore unexpected connections or juxtapostions, in contrast to traumatic experience that “leads to a degradation of metaphorical processes” (p. 924). Similarly, Shaddock (2010) describes the