Poetry and Psychoanalysis: The Opening of the Field provides a guide to applying a poet’s imagination and precision of language to the healing endeavours of psychoanalysis while making a lucid journey through 2,000 years of transformative poetry from Virgil, Dante and Blake to the contemporary poet Claudia Rankine. Patients enter treatment with the hope of being recognized and the hope for transformation of a painful experience. David Shaddock shows how poetry can guide psychoanalysts towards meeting that hope. The book is based on the proposition that an accurate recognition of what is leads to the opening of what could be. The imaginative space that opens between poem and reader or therapist and patient can be a place of healing and transformation. Poetry and Psychoanalysis will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists interested in using literature and creativity as inspiration for both their clinical work and personal growth, as well as all who love poetry.

"Poetry and Psychoanalysis: The Opening of the Field provides a guide to applying a poet's imagination and precision of language to the healing endeavours of psychoanalysis, whilst making a lucid journey through two thousand years of transformative poetry from Virgil, Dante and Blake to the contemporary poet Claudia Rankine. Patients enter treatment with the hope of being recognized and the hope for transformation of painful experience. David Shaddock shows how poetry can guide psychoanalysts towards meeting that hope. The book is based on the proposition that an accurate recognition of what is leads to the opening of what could be. The imaginative space that opens between poem and reader or therapist and patient can be a place of healing and transformation. Poetry and Psychoanalysis will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists interested in using literature and creativity as inspiration for both their clinical work and personal growth, as well as all who love poetry"--

This book is a small anthology: each chapter a kind of meditation-on poetry and psychoanalysis; on a poem, sometimes two; on poetry in general; on thought itself. The poems are beautiful, some are contemporary, some are classical and well worth a reader's attention. "The motive for metaphor" is the title of a short poem of Wallace Stevens in which he says he is "happy" with the subtleties of experience. He likes what he calls the "half colours of quarter things," as opposed to the certainties, the hard primary "reds" and "blues." To grasp and make sense of what is elusive (and beautiful), that is, for the essential and puzzling condition of poetry, we are obliged to make metaphors. The same is perhaps true of psychoanalysis-this is the essential argument of the book. The chapters were originally poetry columns that the author wrote for Psychologist-Psychoanalyst and Division/Review (both journals of the Division of Psychoanalysis of the American Psychological Association).

An engrossing and beautifully crafted memoir of imagination, obsession, and disaster from the couch of old-fashioned four-times-a-week psychoanalysis. Slow Fuse of the Possible is a poet's narrative of a troubled psychoanalysis. It is also a commanding meditation on the powers of language, for good and for ill. From the beginning of their time together, it is clear that the enigmatic analyst and Daniels are not a good match, yet both are determined to continue their work--the former in nearly complete silence, and the latter as best she can with the tools at her disposal: careful attention to language, deep reading, and literary imagination. Throughout, the story is filtered through the mind of Emily Dickinson, whose poetry Daniels uses as a fulcrum for the interpretation of her own experience. The book is saturated with Dickinson's verse, and Dickinson is an increasingly haunting presence as crises emerge and the author unravels. This compelling lyric memoir, so richly steeped in all facets of language and the literary, allows readers a glimpse into the mind of a renowned poet, revealing the dazzling and anguished connections between poetry and psychoanalysis.

At the heart of Origami Bridges is the delicate relationship of trust between analyst and patient, a relationship that grows out of the emotional give-and-take of the psychoanalytic process. In this collection, Diane Ackerman, with astonishing candor, lays bare her desires, anger, jealousy, fears, and anxiety, as she probes not only her present emotional landscape but also her past. And what gradually rises to the surface is an understanding of how the poet uses verse to purge her demons, express her delight, or confess secret longing, and through this process come to a better understanding of the self.

On the Lyricism of the Mind: Psychoanalysis and Literature explores the lyrical dimension (or the lyricism) of the psychic space. It is not presented as an artistic disposition, but rather as a universal psychic quality which enables the recovery and recuperation of the self. The specific nature of human lyricism is defined as the interaction as well as the integration of two psychic modes of experience originally defined by the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion: The emergent and the continuous principles of the self. Dana Amir elaborates Bion's general notion of an interaction between the emergent and the continuous principles of the self, offering a discussion of the specific function of each principle and of the significance of the various types of interaction between them as the basis for mental health or pathology. The author applies these theoretical notions in her analytic work by means of literary illustrations showing how the lyrical dimension may be used to teach psychoanalytic readings of literature and explore the connection between psychoanalytic and literary languages. On the Lyricism of the Mind presents a new psychoanalytic understanding of the capacity to heal, to grieve, to love and to know, using literary illustrations but also literary language in order to extract a new formulation out of the classic psychoanalytic language of Winnicott and Bion. This book will appear to a wide audience to include psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and art therapists. It is also extremely relevant to literary scholars, including students of literary criticism, philosophers of language and philosophers of mind, novelists, poets, and to the wide educated readership in general.

Sabina Spielrein, who has been mostly known for her relation with her analyst Carl Jung, came to the attention of the wider public following the discovery and publication of some of her diaries and personal letters some 40 years ago. The focus on her relationship with Jung and her personal story have consequently led to a neglect of her writings, with many of her crucial texts even remaining untranslated into English. Sabina Spielrein and the Poetry of Psychoanalysis seeks to re-address this distortion of her legacy by examining her original contribution to the field, such as her early analytical work with children. Spielrein referred to moments of intimacy between herself and Jung as "poetry". Indeed, as a response to what can be considered the inevitable failure in her relationship to Jung, Spielrein wrote poetry and songs, notes, and theoretical papers. These writings are examined here as her means of finishing her own analysis. She was the first person to become an psychoanalyst through her own psychoanalysis, a path that would later be recognised as a necessary part of the training for any analyst. The book traces the poetry of Sabina Spielrein’s writing through both its content and style, examining the effect of these writings upon psychoanalysis and inserting them into a lineage of what Lacan would later call the passe: a device that is open for the analysand to finish his or her analysis and accede to the place of psychoanalyst. This book will be of interest to scholars and practitioners of psychoanalysis and other clinicians, including those who work with children, those interested in the early history of psychoanalysis, and those concerned with women’s writing more generally.