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“It was at that age that poetry came in search of me.”
In Climate of Opinion, poet and poetry editor for International Psychoanalysis Irene Willis offers a finely curated perspective on Freud and psychoanalysis from the viewpoints of poets, past and present.
The book's title, a quote from one of the best-known poems about Freud, invites one into dozens of worthy entries, many the poems of academics and psychoanalysts and patients whose names are well known, but equally many by writers who will be new to most readers. There is no apparent science to what Willis includes, only her poet's fine-tuned sensibility. She does not insist that her choices reference Freud or even psychoanalysis directly. Rather, through her selections, she allows us to see these poets' Freud and, via the collection as a whole, her own. This free ranging quality and the enjoyment in her curatorial process evident in her “Introduction” serve the reader well. I was particularly pleased to be introduced to the work of many contemporary poets. Including their voices in this chorus ensures that the reader traverses a vast range of content, tone, and perspective and, in that way, of opinion.
From the powerful role of a listening presence to the evocation of a unique transferential/countertransferential dyad, from affect through self-reflection and insight, from anxiety through gratitude and reparation, Willis effectively includes poems that shift our focus, as though she is rotating a kaleidoscope, offering myriad images of Freud and his legacy as it is reflected in poetry. Thus, her choices evidence not only the ubiquity of Freud's theories in contemporary culture, but also and simultaneously, unique perspectives on them.
I can well imagine the embarrassment of riches Willis faced as she culled what she refers to as the “harvest” of hundreds of poems submitted for entry in this volume. I face a similar quandary in reviewing this beautifully edited collection of dozens of her choices. In the