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What, ideally, is the most advantageous background for a candidate for psychoanalytic training? The creative writer, whether poet, novelist, or playwright, might, to my mind, constitute the more promising raw material from which the better psychoanalyst might be formed. To the quality of such an analyst's interpretive interventions with patients might be brought a finely chiseled clarity, as in good writing, or impact, as in good poetry. And it brings a concentrated, affect-textured style that reaches not only the patients’ minds, but also their guts, that can connect where feelings pulse.
“The artist,” Virginia Woolf (1973) informs us, “is a thinker whose approach is intuitive. At the top of his form, he reveals in a flash, that carries a special kind of beauty, that which others expound and analyze at length.”
“The difference between prose logic and poetic thought,” says Robert Graves in Genius (1984), “is that the logician uses words as a builder uses bricks, involving a comparative unemotional deadness, whereas the poet deals with words as living creatures.”
Should the preanalytic background have been in literature and in the classics, in the thoughtful study of character in depth, of relationships and their subtleties, such candidates may bring richer endowments of the