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Since its beginnings psychoanalysis has had a strong, if ambivalent, relationship with literature and the arts. Holmes is keen to reassert the value of this interdisciplinary connection in The Therapeutic Imagination, which is about the use of literature to develop understanding of therapeutic process and technique. In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud presented poets and philosophers as the true discoverers of the unconscious, and psychoanalysis as a scientific outgrowth from the main culture, the aim of which was to subject the workings of unconscious life to systematic study (Freud, 1900). It is possible to read this early psychoanalytic classic, with its fascination with the multi-layered meanings of sign and symbol, and its inspiring sense of the creative power of the unconscious mind, as a book about literature as much as about the psychology of dreams.
If we remind ourselves of this history, an interesting question emerges as to why Holmes would find himself in the position of needing to rediscover the synergy between literature and psychoanalysis. It is worth making the observation that on arts courses in universities in the UK the links between psychoanalysis and the humanities are alive and well, and psychoanalytic thinking about art and society is a serious and sustained focus of study.
Artistic or creative thinking about psychotherapy and psychoanalysis is perhaps more of a rarity at the moment, particularly in the NHS, where the model of the scientist-practitioner is held up as the ideal, and technological thinking, in the form of standardised treatments with predefined outcomes, increasingly holds sway. Psychologists and psychotherapists in public service can, because of the power of the current preoccupation with measurability, find themselves arguing for the scientific status of their discipline by, explicitly or implicitly, defining it against the more open-ended and difficult-to-define-and-categorise activities we associate with the world of the art