The Analytic Lyric

Poems, like the analysand’s ideal discourse, can move associatively. The first thing I learned about poetry as a student of Louise Glück was to enhance this quality: to cut the leaden interstitial lines and free the poem up to new contiguities, which could make electricity. It was unnerving, at first, to be edited by her, to have her cut entire stanzas or suggest rearrangements that fundamentally altered what I had thought was the meaning of the poem. But what were my paltry meanings compared with what the language had to say, liberated from my narrowing control?

As Freud had it, “In Confession the sinner tells what he knows; in analysis the neurotic has to tell more.” To tell more than one knows—that is, to present unconscious material—creates a kind of bind for the hyperverbal patient. It is painful, mortifying even, to realize that one speaks in analysis in large part to give the analyst occasion to hear what one cannot manage to say. Articulation has a value, but command of language is by definition not the point. This is disarming in the extreme. But one of the advantages of the lunatic frequency of analytic sessions is that one eventually tires of telling the same story over and over again. On the other side of that great weariness, I’ve found a tentative desire to be surprised, and thus a more real openness to my analyst’s interpretations, and their invitation to hear myself differently. A sense of humor helps immensely—in poetry, I think, as well.

Louise was a great devotee of psychoanalysis. You can hear it in the restlessness of her poems, their suspicion of their own formulations, the self-overhearing, the self-ironizing, the push to encounter a surprise, what one had not expected to say. She was also allergic to grandstanding, pat half-truths, and preening self-disclosure. This may be an inborn temperament—one I share—but it’s much strengthened by the practice of analysis, which gives the temperament a scene of encounter, and thus a way to speak.

—emily hoffman

Read “Memoir” and “House” by Emily Hoffman.

there is probably a lot of overlap between psychoanalysts and poets because both tend to be obsessives. I mean to say that rumination is a nearly onanistic pleasure for both, and both overestimate, to a similar degree, the meaningfulness of random signs. Sorry, I mean to say that both experience, to a similar degree, the meaningfulness of random signs. In any case, good analysts, like good poets, find a way to do something with their misprisions. The poet and the analyst alike are particularly attuned to words that make themselves and others shiver, and they may manipulate their encounters with others (and even with themselves) by dint of this fact.

Then there’s the less spooky but more cynical explanation for the overlap: University positions are drying up for writers, and the person whose trade is language has to make their living somewhere, somehow. Hence therapy.

Five years ago, when I wrote the poem “Parents,” I wasn’t yet seeing an analyst or training to become one. I was thinking about how I wanted to make more money. (My apartment was not getting heat that winter, I remember.) In the years that followed, I began to call my parents on the telephone more often.

—D. a. fisher

Read “Parents” by D. A. Fisher.

this past spring, I told my analyst I could not cry in front of her. She replied, “Well, maybe you don’t really want to cry.” I said I was crying all the time! I felt worthless! Then she spun the line: “But you’re a smart girl—you know you’re not worthless. So why have you agreed to play this role in the theater of your worthlessness?”

That sent me down a rabbit hole. I began to wonder: In what dynamics are certain “I’s” and “yous” stuck in a formulaic, melancholic orientation in lyric poems? Must the speaker always want to master the addressee, or to see themself in the masochistic light of the addressee’s rejection? I remember reading Yeats in college and thinking, my god, this guy loves pain, but at least he makes it artful. At the time, I might have called this “sublimation,” turning one’s personal pain into art, but now I feel more skeptical about Yeats’s speaker, who often cannot see himself beyond his self-assigned role as a thwarted man.

Both poetry and psychoanalysis teach us about our mechanisms of desire, our violent interiorities, and, yes, old feelings that precede language. I love Shakespeare’s Sonnet 39, which I joke to my students is a great poem about resisting codependency in love. The speaker requires the “sour leisure” of his beloved’s absence in order to long for his beloved—but he also needs it in order not to become his beloved. He wants them to remain “twain.” Distance is needed to self-reflect, to maintain sovereignty, to see the beloved as a separate love object you don’t want to annihilate or devour. Psychoanalysis knows that we must also see ourselves at a distance in order to unmask ourselves. We have to learn to live with our contradictions, ambivalence, self-sabotage, wounds, and aggressive drives while not clinging to the myth of wholeness or goodness. We are not hygienic creatures, thank god.

—megan fernanDes

Read “In the Mood for Love” by Megan Fernandes.

in a 1947 essay for the Yale Poetry Review—a short-lived doppelgänger of this magazine—William Carlos Williams wrote that “the objective in writing is, to reveal.” More precisely, to reveal that “which is inside the man.” He argued that the stream-of-consciousness method popular among some early modernists was “correct”: it “wanted to let out something even if it didn’t know what.”

When I entered psychoanalysis, I, too, might have endorsed “revelation” and “stream of consciousness.” But a few years out, I feel differently. Writing can serve whatever aim it pleases, perhaps even giving pleasure. Doing so requires some awareness, though perhaps not too much, of a notional other with whom one hopes to communicate. Stream of consciousness, though often effective, can sometimes generate poetry that, to quote Louise Glück on literary narcissism, “sees no particular difference between private reverie and public display.” Self-revelation is not, to my mind, the point of poetry (though it is the point of psychoanalysis); equally, I don’t believe a reader can “know” a poet through their work.

Poetry is artifice; psychoanalysis, too, is artifice. However authentic the relationship between patient and analyst, the structure is artificial. Dreams, slips of the tongue, vocabulary—all are taken out of context, examined by the analyst, and returned to the patient, but not necessarily as revelation. An idea is tested, one that the patient may find neither resonant nor prepossessing. This “idea-testing” requires of the patient what I might call curious ambivalence, which demands an openness that is useful in any situation where difference might cause a shutting down or turning away. I apply the lens of curious ambivalence to my poems, giving special attention to their perspective, or subjectivity. I might, in the process, find something like “projection,” which complicates knowability and is more interesting to me than “revelation.” Sometimes I experiment with projection as a poetic device; a poem, after all, is itself projected into a shared fictional space.

—kathryn maris

Read “The Stranger” by Melissánthi, translated by Kathryn Maris, and “The Plumber” by Kathryn Maris.

the analytic text on loop as I wrote these poems was D. W. Winnicott’s “Fear of Breakdown.” Basically, you organize your life around avoiding a breakdown you are (mistakenly) convinced you could never possibly survive, but the truth is you already have—that’s how you know to fear it in the first place.

Oddly, I haven’t thought much about psychoanalysis and poetry together, though there is a similar ambivalence in my approach to each. Each creates room for experimentation in language, but neither gives much thought to the de facto naturalization of the individual. The self appears, untroubled, as a given. But the reproduction of an individuated subject is not at all compulsory, and I actually think psychoanalysis and poetry are two venues where this premise can be meaningfully revised. In other words: analysis and poetry both participate in making individuals, but they don’t have to. And while the force of individuation is so seamless as to make consent appear inevitable, you can actually say no. I’m interested in what remains of these forms once we do.

Analysis also has a temporality. It attaches to the unconscious repetition of the past in the present, to narrative and Bildung. I started analysis as a child, which means I had almost no past to bring into the room. What I brought instead was my social context, other people. For me, an original separation between the psychic and the social never fully existed. The integration of these realms remains crucially important to me.

If there’s a breakdown I fear, it’s not only mine. It’s the collapse of others around me, the sudden intensification of force. Ironically, that first appeared in my life under the auspices of treatment.

—wendy lotterman

Read “Just Us” and “Middle Vision” by Wendy Lotterman.

the psychoanalyst Masud Khan draws our attention to something he calls our “self-cures,” or the things we do that keep us from feeling fully alive—itself a terror for many. We might have difficulty giving up self-cures because they feel protective, even if, across a life, this kind of psychic safety might produce some bad trades. Non-experience is, after all, often less threatening than experience.

My poem “A Peer Among Friends” addresses those forms of self-cure, of letting them go, of becoming—or becoming again. In my life, I abandon the scene of writing poetry and then eventually return. I do not yet know which position—writing in verse or giving it up—is the self-cure. (I’ll go speak to my analyst about it in about an hour.)

Not long before the poet Alice Notley died, I visited with her. Alice greeted me by saying she knew I would write a poem that day. I scoffed at her, and told her it had been years since I’d made anything. But Alice was right; I went back to my hotel room and did so. It was this poem, and this poem is for her.

—hannah zeavin

Read “A Peer Among Friends” by Hannah Zeavin.

in truth, I don’t think about poetry very much when practicing psychoanalysis, and I don’t think about analysis very much when writing poetry. Perhaps it’s not to my credit that I keep these parts of my life so “split off ” (as the analysts would say). What, for me, poetry and analysis do share is the prospect of putting together, from bits and pieces, a picture of someone’s inner world. In the poem excerpted here, I hope to do something of that sort for the life and work of Wilfred Ruprecht Bion. (People aren’t poems, and poems aren’t people, but poems can be about people, and not just through the first-person singular of the dramatic or confessional monologue.)

Being an analyst or a poet in this mode calls for putting oneself aside while remaining completely present, a paradox I find beguiling. Reticence becomes a fruitful form of action. It makes space to be curious about the ordinary. Thomas Ogden writes, “All that has been most obvious to the patient will no longer be treated as self-evident; rather, the familiar is to be wondered about, to be puzzled over, to be newly created in the analytic setting.” Curiosity in this vein, I think, is the fundamental posture of both analysts and poets. It opens the door for creativity—for healing. The work happens in deep privacy in the consulting room. In the poem, it takes a public form.

—eli payne manDel

Read “from –K” by Eli Payne Mandel.

it took time for me to find my way to poetry, much longer to find my way to psychoanalysis, but I now know both to be the systems of belief that shape and give meaning to my life. “Systems,” I say, but it may be that they are one and the same. I entered both to know myself better, to experience my being individual, independent, and beautiful or capable of beauty, but what I have found is a space for listening. In a way, it reminds me of T. S. Eliot’s remark in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” that poetry “is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” I have not jettisoned my own, but being with others’ language (as a teacher and as a therapist) does make more space—a space in which, as Wallace Stevens wrote, “being there together is enough.” Yes, it is most certainly language and the attention to it that I want to spend my days on, but what this opens up is far beyond (beneath) what language does. There are ineffable experiences, untranslatable events that occur especially when two people are somehow together. I feel very fortunate to have the opportunities to listen.

—jay deshpande

Read “Sleep Training” by Jay Deshpande.