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David Shaddock, a published poet and inter-subjectivist psychotherapist, has written a book with an intriguing title. Aiming in a general way at inspiring clinical work, he wants to open an imaginative space between the patient and analyst on one side and the poet and reader on the other.
Poetry has not always had a good press in terms of creativity. Plato, for example, argued strongly that art and poetry are extremely bad for us. He gives this view a trial run in Ion, which is an argument with a rhapsode (that is a poetry reciter), of that name (Plato (Saunders ed.), 1987). A fuller account of his disagreement with them is given in Books III and X of The Republic (Cornford, 1941, see also Murdoch, 1977). He argues that Art is always bad for us because it is only imitation and copying. Poets who recite emotions in a similar way are detrimental to the psyche, for how could a thing without a rational account ever lead to knowledge?
However, the good news for the reputation of poets is that, particularly from the nineteenth century onwards, things have moved full circle. The pivotal turning point was probably Coleridge's doctrine of the Imagination, which made feeling the key to interpreting life (Coleridge, 1985; Holmes, 1982).
To skip ahead from poetry to psychoanalysis, one can link the process of Coleridge's Imagination with Wilfred Bion's key idea of alpha function. Both concepts can transform our experience and help us develop. Both are a sort of combination of a Noah's Ark for feeling and a rocket launch pad for mental growth. Contrast with Coleridge's Imagination, a poor cousin he called fancy—a depressingly less symbolic, less alive, activity that simply rearranged things in the mind as counters (as in a game of draughts) but which can pass itself off as Imagination at first glance. This is the difference between what M. H. Abrams famously called The Mirror and the Lamp—imitation versus the internal illumination of emotional inspiration (Abrams, 1953).
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