In a new book, Night Errands: How Poets Use Dreams, Roderick Townley likens the poetic process to the psychological process of dreaming. He points out that both make use of compression and imagery and both involve a sense of “doubleness.” He also likens both to a form of play that is fundamentally associative. Analysts who appreciate poetry have a deep familiarity with this.
Perhaps as you read the poetry presented here and in future poetry columns in TAP, it will remind you of dreaming, daydreaming, or fantasizing. Like dreaming, the richest writing seems to arrive like a straight shot from unconscious aspects of the mind. Because of our understanding of unconscious processes, analysts can have a particularly fertile, unique view of the intense personal human experiences that both poetry and dreaming represent.
William Carlos Williams, poet and M.D., wrote:
As a writer, I have never felt that medicine interfered with me, but rather that it was my very food and drink, the very thing which made it possible for me to write. Was I not interested in man? There the thing was, right in front of me. I touch it, smell it. It was myself, naked, just as it was, without a lie, itself to me in its own terms.
Sheri Hunt
A woman vined in greenSinuous summer girl,She floats among slender trunksRatified, essential.She's caught mid-flightIn metamorphosisUndressed by Autumn's alchemy,She merely blushes red.Midas' touchA light caressAs gilt to goldOr whispers barely heard.Brazen, golden glanceShe turns and in her turning,Half the worldGoes down to ice.
Reprinted with permission from the Journal of the American Medical Association, 10/3/90, Vol. 264, No. 13.
Sheri A. Hunt, M.D., is a candidate at the Seattle Psychoanalytic Society and Institute in both the adult and child training programs. A published poet and a member of TAP's editorial board, she welcomes reader comments and suggestions for “Psychoanalysis and Poetry” at .