Main description:

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.

Contents:

Acknowledgements Preface Part I 01. The Poetics of Psychoanalytic Treatment 02. To Build a New World: Creative and Aesthetic Choices in Psychoanalysis 03. Near the Source of Love Was This: Poems of the Nursery 04. Standing against Silence: Czeslaw Milosz, Denise Levertov and the Poetry of Witness 05. Knowing the Unknowable: The "Difficult" Poetry of Emily Dickinson and Paul Celan Part II 06. Meeting the Father in the Underworld: Virgil's Aeneid, Book VI 07. "I Was Sent Here to Save Him:" Dante's Purgatorio as Therapeutic Journey 08. Mind Forg'd Manacles: William Blake and the Emancipation of Consciousness 09. A Universe Between My Hat and My Boots: Whitman's Self as a Model for empathic connection 010. Wallace Stevens: The World Imagined 011. William Carlos Williams: How to Look, How to Listen 012. Deconstructing Racism: Claudia Rankine's Citizen References Index