You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
If poetry is the spontaneous overflow of emotion recollected in tranquility, as Wordsworth declared, perhaps psychoanalysis is the expression and acceptance of unconscious longings and wishes in the transference. Poetry and psychoanalysis share an intense engagement with language, symbolic meaning, silences, and other nonverbal communicative elements such as rhythm and tone.
David Shaddock, a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and a published poet, explores these and other resonances between the two fields of endeavor in his new book, Poetry and Psychoanalysis: The Opening of the Field. The “field” of the subtitle also refers to the intersubjective field of the analytic encounter, as discussed in this issue of the journal, a relational space charged with meaning akin to Winnicott's “transitional space”—the area between inner and outer reality—and Beebe's realm of the infant/mother dyad (p. xvii, p. 4). Shaddock frequently returns to the theme of a gap, a separation between self and Other that can be bridged through empathic listening and shared perception. He cites Kohut as one of his psychoanalytic heroes, and there are many references to Kohut's theory of transference, his break with Freudian drive theory, and his emphasis on empathy.
Shaddock's first chapter examines four topics in poetics: metaphor; image; sound and rhythm; and form. This chapter is one
of my favorites, not only because these topics are familiar from even a cursory study of poetry but also because they frequently resonate in patients' verbal productions. Metaphor, in which one word creates a likeness between itself and another, the thing it names and something else, is one of the most powerful figurative devices to create understanding, “intersubjective relatedness” (p. 5)—since metaphor helps move preverbal feelings that are difficult to communicate into the shared intersubjective field. Shaddock provides some examples. In the first, the psychoanalyst George Atwood's patient tells him, “I am dead,”