Fine Lines in a Delicate Blur: Some Concerns about the Overlap of Poetry and Therapy

I think sometimes it is best not to write a poem. That to do so, can be dangerous. When feelings become very strong in a particular way, it is advisable to consider deferring them to another person. One of the desired outcomes of psychoanalytic psychotherapy is to understand that humans are not omnipotent, but when a person is really good at listening, it can be as if they are, emotionally. That this is a felt subjective experience may seem like a pittance, yet a little can go a long way (Eigen, 2020). Feelings that could have driven acts of destruction are held and neutralized. I write this from experience on both sides of the coin. A piece of silvery currency flipping in the air, one that pulses with empathy.

There are no hard and fast answers here. They are mercurial, slow, timeless, ever-changing, made one attempt after another, different things working at different times. Bare language doing what's needed in one moment by plainly talking about emotional oblivion, then more veiled complex words contemplating an intellectually entrancing theory in the next instance; then the dreaming heart coming into play by poetically crafting in a state of reverie, followed up by another theory less aesthetic and more raw with feeling; clinical immersion of experience, the case of oneself/the case of another; the mixing of theory, self, other, session, poem—“being this way and then doing that”—“a little over here and then there,” a psyche music (Eigen, 2011) that plays with the different capacities of humanness in a weave that fills in its own gaps through the intuition of the author's textual movements. Poetry and therapy are beyond knowing the frame of either or both. Both taking place in spoken and silent words. Vertices (Bion, 1965) of form as a mediated expression of the baby-self constantly developing in transitional spaces (Winnicott, 2005).

A poem can be like a prayer and elicit the devotion of the mystic upon the page. One feels this, reads this in many poem