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Origami Bridges is a book of poems written during an analytic treatment conducted mostly by phone. Diane Ackerman states that she wrote the poems to “corral the unruly emotions that arose,” but adds that their usefulness to the treatment was secondary to her interest in making the best poems. While many of the poems are quite good (and many have appeared in literary journals without reference to their specific origins, nor to the therapist as that intimate other presented in those poems), I find their quality secondary in value to the illumination of the processes inherent to analytic psychotherapy.
In the book, divided roughly into four sequential phases of their meeting, Ackerman refers to seasons typical of the analytic process. Weather becomes an important motif early on, and it helps her recognize a predictable course in how matters happened between them. It becomes clear the predictability is determined both by the process more generally (e.g., the deepening of transference reactions, the exploration of memory, the dissolution and reintegration of the self) and by her unique history and tendencies. Central to the course of the work (alluded to also as her expedition) was the deepening and understanding of the transference. The first poem in the book speaks of what she does not know about the analyst. And though it is clear she has the opportunity to learn much about him from what is public, Ackerman chooses not to pursue her curiosity. The analyst becomes represented in her mind, then, as someone she will experience as she tends to, as she needs.
I welcome you into the small parlor
of my ear, rearrange a few
pillows left by convention,
and settle you down in my head,
where your voice and mine
can confide at close range….