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Like the unconscious, because it has many different readings, a poem cannot be read in one way and be given a definitive interpretation. In a moment, the poem ends the “tyranny of the intellect.” In the first of three articles, to be published consecutively, the author responds to the question posed by W. R. Bion, “What kind of poets and artists can we [psychoanalysts] be?”
In responding to this question, the author examines the usefulness of considering the psychoanalytic session as a poem, with each session a draft in the making. She proposes that Robert Frost's notion of the “sound of sense, as the abstract vitality of our speech” offers psychoanalysis a way to differentiate in the psychoanalytic session “voice” from “language.” Through Frost's poems, the author shows that the semiotic of prosody travels with the “voice,” that sounds precedes sense.
The author's line of reasoning is that the poet's art is not unknown to the analyst who, with the patient, fashions the sound of sense and its rhythms, in dreams, desires, and love and hate—that is, the libidinal affair of the psychoanalytic session where the vitality of our expressiveness circulates.