Oedipal Flowers: Through Poetics to “O”

A certificate tells me that I was born. I repudiate this certificate: I am not a poet, but a poem. A poem that is being written, even if it looks like a subject.

Psychoanalysis as a story told backwards, while at the same time maintaining forward momentum, of necessity forges its own language conventions. The analyst's challenge is to maintain a conscientious stance within waves of intermittent “push-pull” between subject/object and elemental structures. Language in this context bears its form naturally as memory and sense impression stream into pathways for old and new experiences to arise, translated into the material of a session. The formalized language of theory is a landmark development, reliant upon experience, not the experience itself. In this context each treatment is unmatched.

Both psychoanalysis and poetry contribute to our understanding of the unconscious, such as it is. Each structures psychic territory according to relational themes through the elements of language (Lacan, 1998). The relational nature of formal analytic space functions as the container and the contained (Bion, 1970), or a poem and its subject, wherein the patient and analyst uniquely configure both structure and content. This is especially significant given the impact of primary processes such as splitting and projective identification, upon the analytic couple.