Editorial

It is evident and implicit throughout Freud's work that literature and other cultural productions were vitally important in his ‘scientific project’. His room, after all, with its collection of books where those on archaeology outnumbered those on psychology, and the astonishing array of artefacts, attests to this. The references in his writing to Shakespeare and to Goethe, the choice of the Oedipus myth as the cornerstone of the whole edifice confirm it. But it was up to Lacan to spell out that poetics is ‘that supreme pinnacle of the aesthetics of language’. (Lacan 2006: 238). Exactly what he meant by this would need to be discussed elsewhere but in the same paper, the ‘Rome Discourse’ Lacan introduces the ideas of ‘full speech’ and ‘empty speech’ which are highly relevant to discussions here about what poetry can do. One distinguishing feature of poetry, relevant to psychoanalysis, is that it is a use of language in which the sound—the music—of the words is important and the superficial sense may not be. While this volume was in preparation a performance at the BBC Proms in London of John Cage's music evoked thoughts about what Lacan means when he writes of analysis being like reading a musical score. The instrumentalists played from musical parts that gave them some decisions to make within a prescribed frame and time scale. The resulting experience was of a single, fascinating and immensely complex work consisting of many voices playing together (sometimes together in silence; sometimes together in response to or in evocation of each other).

Much has been written about psychoanalysis and poetry but our attempt here is to try to say something about poetry and psychoanalysis. Poetry often appears in writing about psychoanalysis but apart from Bion's use of Keats's Negative Capability (Bion 1988:125) it is usually illustrative, a higher or prior authority, ‘What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed’. Here, we don't submit to an unquestioning priority of the lyric, but seek pluralities of poetic, confluences of theory and utterance, a dialogue with speech, particularly when language is at the edge—at the navel—of the ineffable, of the tuché. We seek to do more than exercise the creativity of psychoanalysis by supporting its theory with lines from Eliot and Keats. So we ask: what can poetry, poetics

and poets tell us about psychoanalysis? Our starting point was to try to yoke together ideas from different sources: if language is ‘the house of being’ and poetics is that supreme pinnacle, then maybe it is the poets who can help analysts to approach, in the language of the clinic, the dwelling of our patients’ being. And to what extent and how can we answer Lacan's call in 1953 for poetics to become part of analytic training and technique? Which poetics, for a start, should we turn to? Those of Bakhtin, or Kristeva, or Heidegger? It isn't clear. And we wonder which poets to turn to. What theory of poetry to interrogate? How to avoid the problem that much literary criticism has been profoundly influenced by Lacanian theory, so we might be entering a hall of mirrors? There are loci in this field where poet and critic speak to our concerns. For instance, when it is said that Edward Thomas was writing ‘on the edge of consciousness.’ Or when Basil Bunting insists that his Briggflats has no meaning, only music, or elsewhere—more comprehensibly, perhaps—writes the lines: ‘thought's intricate polyphonic score dovetails with the tread / sensuous things / keep in our consciousness’. Perhaps Freud's persistent references to literature and quotes from the poets—whilst also stating that there is an unknowable centre—point to his hope that the language of literature has a clue. This issue of Sitegeist follows up some of these leads, with poems, articles and a conversation with a poet. The reviews cover art exhibitions as well as a book.

Val Parks, in ‘Memorable Speech and Forgotten Speech: Poetry and the Analytic Session’ writes as a practising psychoanalyst. She takes a song lyric which—properly—conveys substance (the music) that is ‘lost on the page’; and she muses about the language of poetry that can be enjoyed without noticing the meaning. Throughout the paper she explores what might be similarities between, for instance, enjoying a poem and listening to an analysand without knowing the meaning of the words. In a paper full of surprise turns she examines how poems and analysis can be thought together, using ideas of jouissance and performative speech, for example, drawn from Lacan and Butler. Parks explores the notion that the written account of an analytic session and a poem might have the same kind of (aesthetic, or phenomenological?) status. Her solution to the ethical problem of reporting on the speech of analysands is provocative (and you'll have to read it to find out what

it is). Furthermore, she takes the idea of the line and the stanza as essential parts of the structure of meaning in poetry and applies the idea of their presence to the acts of punctuation and scansion in Lacanian psychoanalysis. This is her take on poetics. In her view the prosody of the literary critic is active in the analyst's attention to the patient's signifiers.

What better, more originary place to start an exploration of poetry and psychoanalysis than Aristotle's Poetics and Freud's ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working Through’? This is Barry Watt's starting point, having first established most ingeniously and convincingly both biographical and etymological links between the texts. His paper, ‘Twoing and Froing: Between Imitation and Representation’ drives a closely argued and intricate argument through pairs of opposing terms derived from Aristotle's use of mimesis and catharsis. Assuming the truth of Watt's assertion that Freud and Breuer would have known the new interpretation of Aristotle—by a close relative of both Freud's wife and of Breuer's patient—then psychoanalytic theory and practice are shown to have their birth in the Poetics. Never far from memories of the clinic, Watt's language playfully pursues his theme (for instance in the inescapable punning of the title) and concludes with reference to the emergence of the patient as poet, and calls for further research on the implications of a psychoanalysis that conjoins poetry and science.

Carol Watts tackles the modernist poet J.H. Prynne. By walking us through some of this difficult poetry, leaning on Lacan, Laplanche, Gillian Rose, Judith Butler and others, she implicitly demonstrates a way to listen to what we are calling the ‘full speech’ of poetry. This is a very widely referenced paper, with an understanding of Laplanche's theory of seduction and the enigmatic signifier at its heart. The work of the paper is in finding the site of woman in ‘the double and triple bind of Western citizenship’ and the ‘other in me’ in her reading. There is also a use of ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ (taken from Peter Osborne) which enables her to slide together the political and the psychic, as it were, just as Prynne's poems do. It is a challenging paper, engaging with ideas of a poetics that are centrally relevant to the project of psychoanalysis today. And with poetry that is more often talked about than read. One can imagine that Lacan would approve of this injection of such a widely referenced analysis of the poetics of a major living poet whose

work is so challenging because it is unashamedly difficult. This is poetry that requires in its reading the problematisation of theories of meaning, of language, of subjectivity, of sex. Watts's intricate and captivating essay holds together many aspects of language, of subjectivity, of work, of difficulty, of violence and of desire.

Simon Barraclough's poems are infused with psycho-analysis, but subtly. They use a playful, self-denigrating cultural referencing that seems to play with the same evasions and liminality that psychoanalysis is familiar with. It seemed interesting to see what this poet—familiar with personal psychotherapy but also with Freudian and Lacanian writing—might have to say about the ways in which poetry and psychoanalysis inhabit discourse. Form, creativity, meaning, otherness, the body, relationships are all terms in common between Barraclough's postmodern poetics and psychoanalysis. Here is a poet who is confident to publish words that move between the confessional, the dream and the ludic.

A poem in John Ashbery's most recent volume, Planisphere, has the words: ‘You never know how things work out / except through “sleight” of hand, sometimes.’ This characteristically captures in speech the familiar way for us all that events never quite fall under our control, and that there can be an overabundance of serendipity. The call for papers for this issue of Sitegeist brought a surprising total of 36 poems from eight poets who mostly have some—or considerable—publishing history. The eventual selection of nine poems (most of them previously unpublished) by five of the poets was chosen because these poems were considered successful poems—they are ‘memorable speech’—and also because they situate themselves in relation to some aspect of psychoanalysis. One poet indeed wrote to say: ‘All my poems come out of an efflorescence of neuroses; so, like all writers, I could provide endless case studies for your readers’. However, a particular selection criterion announced itself: these are mostly poems whose speaking subject appears to know itself. In other words, they are poems that address an other who is silent and unacknowledged (perhaps the reader, or perhaps another part of the speaker or, as, Laplanche has it, ‘the other in me’). They are not poems addressed to, say, a lover, or the public, or any identifiable ‘ideal reader’. In different ways they all appear to speak not just about themselves, and not just to us, but about

themselves to us. (As Lacan has it about the end of psychoanalysis.) This is not true of all good poems, as the Donne quoted by Val Parks shows. The poems by Kate Noakes and Peter Robinson talk from a site of fracture or displacement: Noakes's precise ornithological metaphor is of pain and exile while Robinson's voice is surprised to be temporarily not lost, and in his other poem, distracted by normality while on the edge of illness. Lesley Saunders and Ian House approach Freud directly, gazing at his chair, or posited inside his head, or witnessing him faint while with Jung. House's other poem is the result of a creative writing exercise in what analysts might call Nachträglichkeit. Wendy Klein's poems are spoken by a psychiatric patient and by a therapist, while Catherine Fraser's two poems speak from the place of the suffering analysand. Finally, to illustrate the conversation with him, Simon Barraclough and his publisher have given permission for us to publish a poem he refers to in the interview: ‘Christmas at the School of Psychological Medicine’.

Finally, we can announce that Sitegeist is continuing and nevertheless changing. In future it will be published electronically but not in paper form. Details of how to obtain it will be available on the website (). Meanwhile, the next two issues are being planned and we are pleased to call for papers as follows. Sitegeist 9, to be published in the first half of 2013 will be on ‘Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience’. Sitegeist 10, to be published to coincide with the Annual Conference in late 2013 will be on ‘Memory, Memoir and Remembrance: how our society processes trauma’. If you wish to contribute, please see the Notes for Future Contributors and Call for Writing in this volume and/or contact one of the editorial team.