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Like the artist, the analyst tries to take possession of the word again by freeing it from the suffocation of everyday use; he searches for the echoes of the very elements of every language and of every experience, fully aware of the inevitable disparity between what his formulation will be able to express and all the rest that remains unsaid and that perhaps cannot be either said or heard. (Canestri 1994, 1090)
We travel far in thought, in imagination or in the realm of memory. Events happened as they happened, not all of them of course but here and there a memory or a fragment of a dream-picture is actual, is real, is like a work of art or is a work of art … there are priceless broken fragments that are meaningless until we find the other broken bits to match them.
(Doolittle, poet, describing her analysis with Freud 1971, 41–42)
There is a long history of interchange between psychoanalysis and art. In the 1950s, Marion Milner, researching into free-floating states of mind for self-exploration in the analytic setting and in artistic creativity, writes:
a strong case could be made out … for seeing the basic function of a work or art, not as communication (though it can serve as that), not as reparation (though it can stand for that), not as giving reassurance that there is a sphere in which conflict can be solved (though it does do that); but as having to do essentially with the very basis of our interest in anything beyond the primary objects of instincts. In fact, it not only uses symbols, it creates symbols. By means of its subtle fusion of form and content, feeling and idea, it reveals the familiar in the unfamiliar, and so brings about that extension and transference of interest which Ernest Jones describes as the basis of civilization. (Milner 1954, 411)
Sixty years later, using the Bionian notion of reverie, sculptor and psychoanalyst Shierry Weber Nicholsen discusses the role of reverie both in his stone work and in the analytic work:
I have this piece of stone