Psychoanalysis as poetry.

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Jeanine M. Vivona

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PSYCHOANALYSIS AS POETRY Like psychoanalysis, poetry is possible because of the nature of verbal language, particularly its potentials to evoke the sensations of lived experience. These potentials are vestiges of the personal relational context in which language is learned, without which there would be no poetry and no psychoanalysis. Such a view of language infuses psychoanalytic writings on poetry, yet has not been fully elaborated. To further that elaboration, a poem by Billy Collins is presented to illustrate the sensorial and imagistic potentials of words, after which the interpersonal processes of language development are explored in an attempt to elucidate the original nature of words as imbued with personal meaning, embodied resonance, and emotion. This view of language and the verbal form allows a fuller understanding of the therapeutic processes of speech and conversation at the heart of psychoanalysis, including the relational potentials of speech between present individuals, which are beyond the reach of poetry. In one sense, the work of the analyst is to create language that mobilizes the experiential, memorial, and relational potentials of words, and in so doing to make a poet out of the patient so that she too can create such language.

It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there. —William Carlos Williams, from “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” (1955)

Professor of Psychology, The College of New Jersey; adjunct clinical faculty, Department of Psychiatry, Pennsylvania Hospital. A version of this paper was presented at the Winter Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association, New York, January 18, 2013. Submitted for publication June 28, 2013. DOI: 10.1177/0003065113513639 Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Queen Mary, University of London on March 16, 2015

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A layman will no doubt find it hard to understand how pathological disorders of the body and mind can be eliminated by “mere” words. He will feel that he is being asked to believe in magic. And he will not be so very wrong, for the words which we use in our everyday speech are nothing other than watered-down magic. —Sigmund Freud (1905, p. 283)

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sychoanalysis1 is carried out through words, yet we lack cogent explanations of the therapeutic action of the verbal and linguistic processes that are at work in talking and listening. To a regrettable degree, belief in psychoanalytic treatment still requires belief in words as “watered-down magic” because we have not fully explicated the therapeutic properties and potentials of the language in speech. We tend to consider speech primarily as a medium of psychoanalysis and less as a mechanism that participates in therapeutic action. On the one hand, when we conceptualize speaking as an interpersonal action with therapeutic power, we often overlook the role of language in speech. On the other hand, when we explain the therapeutic value of interpretation and insight with appeals to the Enlightenment notion that insight leads to change because knowledge sets one free (see Eagle 2011), we invoke a tautology that renders explanation unnecessary. Yet there are oases in our literature where insights about the therapeutic action of language can be found. To my mind, some of the richest discussions of language in psychoanalysis today are those in which we allow poetry to reveal the action of the verbal therapeutic process. Poetry is nothing but words. Yet the undeniable power of poetry to evoke feelings and alter understandings invites comparison with the action of psychoanalysis. For instance, Ogden (1999) and Parsons (2007) identify a source of therapeutic action in the analyst’s ability to listen to the patient’s speech as to a poem, remaining open to its multisensorial reverberations as sources of meaning. Seiden (2004) understands the therapeutic value of metaphor as an instrument for both discovering and creating new meanings. Charles (2010) elaborates the importance of the verbal form, particularly its use of symbols at once personal and communal, for giving shape to senses and meanings that may be inchoate. Shaddock (2010), a poet and psychoanalyst, believes “effective interpretations draw 1

I believe that the therapeutic contributions of language I explore here are similarly active in both psychoanalysis proper and psychoanalytic therapy. I therefore do not distinguish between these modes of treatment in this paper.

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PSYCHOANALYSIS AS POETRY

on the same language skills—concision, clarity, allusiveness—that inform the best poems” (p. 244). Caston (2007) likens termination of psychoanalysis to the “poetic closure” that both reader and writer may experience at the conclusion of a poem. In her commentary on Caston’s notion of poetic closure, the poet Irene Willis (2007) notes that Caston uses the word poetic in a colloquial rather than precise sense; by contrast, she asserts, “Words are what we are talking about when we speak of poetry—words as they move through space, making their own music” (p. 44). From among the many points of connection between poetry and psychoanalysis, I focus narrowly on the nature of words that poetry reveals to us, particularly their evocative and active potentials, without which there would be no poetry and no psychoanalysis. Indeed, the words the poet elevates to art are at work in psychoanalysis all the time as a source of therapeutic action. Using clinical examples that are not manifestly poetic or remarkable, I attempt to show some common yet important contributions of words to therapeutic action, made possible by the embodied and evocative nature of language that poetry reveals. I begin with a discussion of a poem by Billy Collins as a basis for considering the sensorial and imagistic potentials of words. I then explore the interpersonal processes of language development to elucidate the original nature of words as imbued with personal meaning, embodied resonance, and emotional tone. This developmental view of words and the verbal form allows a fuller appreciation of the verbal therapeutic processes that are at work in the speech and conversation of psychoanalysis, not only the sensorial underpinnings of words revealed by poetry but also the relational potentials of speech between individuals, which are beyond the reach of the written poem. S O M E T H I N G I A M U N L I K E LY E V E R T O D O

To see what language is doing in poetry, I ask you now to read Billy Collins’s poem, “Fishing on the Susquehanna in July,” which appears below.2

2 “Fishing on the Susquehanna in July” from Picnic, Lightning, by Billy Collins, © 1998. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.


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I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna or on any river for that matter to be perfectly honest. Not in July or any month have I had the pleasure—if it is a pleasure— of fishing on the Susquehanna. I am more likely to be found in a quiet room like this one— a painting of a woman on the wall, a bowl of tangerines on the table— trying to manufacture the sensation of fishing on the Susquehanna. There is little doubt that others have been fishing on the Susquehanna, rowing upstream in a wooden boat, sliding the oars under the water then raising them to drip in the light. But the nearest I have ever come to fishing on the Susquehanna was one afternoon in a museum in Philadelphia when I balanced a little egg of time in front of a painting in which that river curled around a bend under a blue cloud-ruffled sky, dense trees along the banks, and a fellow with a red bandanna sitting in a small, green flat-bottom boat holding the thin whip of a pole. That is something I am unlikely ever to do, I remember saying to myself and the person next to me.

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Then I blinked and moved on to other American scenes of haystacks, water whitening over rocks, even one of a brown hare who seemed so wired with alertness I imagined him springing right out of the frame.

I am interested here in Collins’s use of words to create lived experience. Through the plain language of this poem, Collins creates for the reader, and for himself, an experience he has never lived. We hear the oars sliding under the water as we row up the river, see the glittering drops fall from the oars as they rise, feel the gentle sway of the boat on the river. No less do we see the paintings in Philadelphia and through them to the experiences they depict, perhaps especially that brown hare “springing right out of the frame.” Once we have read this poem, we have been fishing on the Susquehanna in July. Collins’s poem enacts the vivid lived experience through words. Yet from the first line, denial is the manifest content of this poem: I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna or on any river for that matter to be perfectly honest. Not in July or any month have I had the pleasure—if it is a pleasure— of fishing on the Susquehanna.

Psychoanalysts are familiar with this kind of denial, in which the semantic content of words conveys one message and the tone or feeling conveys quite another, as happens with the patient who states, “I am not angry with you for going on vacation,” and then shows with tone of voice just how angry she is. It is a denial that calls attention to itself, “to be perfectly honest.” Collins proclaims his utter ignorance of the experience of fishing; it is unknown to him; it could not be more different from what he actually does in his “quiet room.” Yet the cadence of his poem conveys the rolling rhythm of the boat, where we sit, waiting for the fish to bite. This rhythm infuses the stanzas about writing as well as those about fishing, asserting an affinity the semantic content belies. I am more likely to be found in a quiet room like this one— a painting of a woman on the wall, Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Queen Mary, University of London on March 16, 2015

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a bowl of tangerines on the table— trying to manufacture the sensation of fishing on the Susquehanna.

This rhythm is briefly broken in the middle of the fourth stanza with “trying to manufacture the sensation / of fishing on the Susquehanna.” This gets our attention; we trip over its awkward rhythm and hard syllables. Why manufacture? Of course, it is another denial, but not only that. Manufacture announces the work of the poet and calls attention to the poem in part by interrupting the experience it has begun to create in the reader. Perhaps Collins wants us to experience the distance of these four syllables—manufacture. Even when we have worked our way through them, we have made it only to “the sensation.” We are still so many syllables from “the Susquehanna.” He continues: There is little doubt that others have been fishing on the Susquehanna, rowing upstream in a wooden boat, sliding the oars under the water then raising them to drip in the light.

When we finally arrive at the river, it is through the proxy experience of the “others” who have been fishing on the Susquehanna, perhaps like the others who would be angry about a therapist’s vacation, of whom there can be “little doubt.” Yet the experience itself is no less palpable, no less real, for being conveyed as if through the eyes of another. Collins achieves this immediacy in part by putting us on the river, where we are “rowing,” “sliding,” and “raising.” We are not observing the actions of another; we are doing. Then Collins calls us back with a jarring “But” (like his “blink” that comes in the last stanza): But the nearest I have ever come to fishing on the Susquehanna was one afternoon in a museum in Philadelphia

Collins reminds us again that we are in a poem, not on a river; we must not forget that the reality we are experiencing is created by the poem, a reality undiminished by the fact that the experience Collins now describes 1114



is triply mediated by a painting in a museum in Philadelphia. And yet, beyond the “little egg of time,” there we are under a blue cloud-ruffled sky, dense trees along the banks, and a fellow with a red bandanna sitting in a small, green flat-bottom boat holding the thin whip of a pole.

This poem is an ironic tribute to language itself. PHONEMES AND FEELINGS

How do words create these sensuous experiences? In psychoanalysis, we appreciate the powerful effects a speaker brings to words though tone of voice, as well as through facial expressions, body posture, and gestures. We know that the act of speaking can convey meaning along with and sometimes in contrast to the meaning conveyed through the semantics of words. Poetry invites us to ponder the evocative power of words themselves. When we read a poem silently, there is no tone of voice to hear, other than the one we create or remember as we read. There is no speaker before us from whom to observe facial expressions, postures, and gestures. Yet we do hear and see and feel. Poetry helps us remember that words are sounds that can move us, even without a voice to speak them. Were this not so, there would be no poetry. Sensuous experiences evoked by words arise jointly from sound and semantics. For instance, linguistic sounds assist semantics in the creation of visual imagery. Collins’s “thin whip” of a pole is so thin not only because of the redundant description (could there be a fat whip?) but also because of the slender sounds of his words, each with its thin short i. Similarly, we see the Susquehanna “curled around a bend” with the help of the round, curling sounds of those words. “Manufacture” sounds like hard work. “Ruffled” sounds ruffled. Moreover, as I mentioned, the cadence of Collins’s words evokes the sensation of a boat swaying gently on the river. Alliteration contributes to this swaying effect even in Collins’s description of his quiet room—”woman on the wall,” “tangerines on the table.” Collins’s use of the continuous present tense—rowing, sliding, raising, and, finally, springing—gives a feeling of immediacy to lived action that is ongoing, and also sustains the rolling rhythm. Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Queen Mary, University of London on March 16, 2015

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Although we feel the rhythm of the fishing boat and see the fellow with his red bandanna, we may not know how Collins’s words are creating these sensations and images in us. Such effects of words may be particularly elusive when, as in this poem, the explicit semantic meaning of the words contradicts the experiential effects of their sounds and cadence. When such moments arise in our psychoanalytic work, we may attribute our somatic resonances to something other than the patient’s words and presume the mechanism to be something other than verbal. Lacking the poet’s knowledge of these potentials in words, and his gift for mobilizing them, we may miss the experiential contributions of words to therapeutic action. This is perhaps all the more likely when we ascribe to a conceptualization of words as abstract, disembodied, emotionally neutral symbols whose connections are primarily with other symbols (see, e.g., Stern 1985; Boston Change Process Study Group [BCPSG] 2007 [but cf. BCPSG 2008]; Bucci 1997; Damasio 1999). It is to the nature of words that I now turn. W H AT ’ S I N A W O R D ?

According to the highly influential (and often critiqued) view of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1915), a word is a type of sign, whose sound, called the signifier, designates a concept or category, called the signified. Many words also point through the signified to a referent in the world, though Saussure emphasized the structural rather than the referential nature of language. For example, river denotes a large stream of water flowing in a definite course. The word can be used to refer to various such streams of water, including the Susquehanna River. Meanings in language are always relative; the scope of a word is determined by the other words in the lexicon; river is neither creek nor ocean but somewhere in between. The word both differentiates and amalgamates; it makes more of some features of things and less of others as it gathers things together and distinguishes them from other kinds of things. In these ways, language constructs rather than reflects meaning. Saussure asserted that the relationship between the word’s sound and the concept it signifies is arbitrary. That is, with a few exceptions such as onomatopoeia, the link between word and meaning cannot be perceived because the sound of the word does not designate the signified; the sound does not reveal the meaning, even if it sometimes contains clues, as we see in Collins’s poem (see Ramachandran and Hubbard 2001). Even then, 1116



the link between word and concept is established not by reason or perception but by convention, and thus language is “a product inherited from preceding generations” (Saussure 1915, p. 71). Long before Saussure, Shakespeare, that master of words, highlighted the arbitrariness of words in Juliet’s famous question: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.” If the link between signifier and signified is truly arbitrary, it does not matter what we call the rose or our beloved. The name would be inconsequential in light of one’s experience of the thing. Juliet had her reasons for decrying the importance of a name, but should we accept her logic? Certainly, the name does not determine the thing any more than the thing determines its name, and yet their confluence in the word is consequential. For example, synonyms, different words with the same ostensible meaning, have different senses, different connotations that offer different shades of meaning, even when their referents are perceptibly identical. The word is more than a neutral label, then; it tells us something we cannot perceive. Collins’s “fellow with a red bandanna” smells sweeter than if Collins had referred to him as a “man with a red bandanna.” The fellow could be a friend; he’s one of us. We would have no similar sense about the man; who is he? Didn’t Juliet love Romeo in part because his name was Montague? Taken at face value, the arbitrary nature of the connections between words and their meanings seems to highlight the abstracting functions of language and the potential resulting disconnections between language and life. To the extent that language is a system of signs pointing to abstract categories and to other signs, language seems more self-referential than world-referential. Indeed, for Saussure, language is a powerful instrument of thought because it is autonomous from the lived world. Moreover, if the presence of words in a lexicon shapes what we label things in the world and therefore what we can think about those things (recall that Eskimos, famously but falsely, are said to have a dozen words for snow [Martin 1986]), then words may also misrepresent reality. That is, the differentiations made in language may be imposed on the world rather than derived from it. The world that language constructs may be a false world. Yet when we consider the implications of the fact that there is no inherent relation between a word and its meaning, we do not find that language is in essence arbitrary and abstract. On the contrary, the fact that the signs of language are a product of preceding generations that must be Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Queen Mary, University of London on March 16, 2015

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learned from other people suggests that the word is grounded in experience in the world and within the relationship with the person from whom words are learned. This implies the inherent individuality of each person’s language, both the meaning of words (Loewald 1978) and the meaning of speaking (Amir 2010; Rizzuto 2004), as a consequence of individual relational experience, particularly in early development (Harris 1992; Litowitz 2007, 2011). From the perspective of the individual, then, we cannot call a rose by any other name than the one we learn through living. That the word’s meaning must be learned through experience has three far-reaching, interrelated implications about the nature of words: (1) word meanings may be personal and idiosyncratic as well as universal; (2) word meanings may be embodied as well as abstract; and (3) words may be imbued with emotion as well as neutral. Moreover, the original personal, embodied, and emotional nature of words is not lost to development but remains a source of power in language, and particularly of therapeutic action. These potentials come into focus when we attend to the origins and processes of language development. I now take up each of these implications in turn. WORD MEANINGS ARE PERSONAL A N D I D I O S Y N C R AT I C

The first implication of the learned nature of word meanings is the highly individual quality of each person’s lexicon. The experiential context of language development is unique for each person, and that context imbues words with a personal sense, along with a consensual meaning, so that the same word may have different shades of meaning for different people. These personal senses are sometimes accessible to reflection. When you hear the word river, which river comes to mind? For me, it is the Hudson River, which was a central feature of the landscape of my childhood. This is the river that river means to me, and which I bring to Collins’s poem. A patient bemoaned her habit of chewing a pack of gum each day to manage the stresses of her demanding job; she chewed gum to prevent overeating and putting on weight. Yet she saw this not as a reasonable strategy, but as a lapse. Each stick of gum, she confessed, was like “a shot of liquor,” leaving her with “a bloated belly, a sore jaw, and an aching head.” Perhaps worst of all, it left her wanting more. She “knew” she was ignoring these bodily consequences and “the real problem” of her dissatisfying job. Yet she had become, she asserted now, “an addict who 1118



needs the hit of sweetness.” I was struck by her agitated confession, culminating in the one-two punch of “addict” and “hit.” Her forceful tone implied that her meaning was self-evident, yet I did not understand how the behavior she described warranted the self-reproaching label. Dare I ask? With hesitation, I said, “An addict?” She paused and looked at me closely. Did I not understand the dangers? She is an addict, she asserted, because she gives in to her desire; to be an addict is to be at the mercy of desire, always in danger of being ravaged. I marveled aloud at the danger in allowing herself a little sweetness. She then realized the implications of her words and quipped, “Maybe chewing gum isn’t so bad if it keeps me from having an affair with my twenty-year-old coworker!” Responding to my question about her words, the patient articulated the meanings that lay within them, thoughts and feelings that were speakable yet not initially spoken. As happens often, focusing on the patient’s specific words yielded a cascade of idiosyncratic meaning (see Wilson and Weinstein 1992). Among the senses that may lurk in a word such as addict, this exploration revealed the particular problem of desire that was embedded in this word for this person. Moreover, this exploration initiated the ongoing work of redefining these words, with the hope of liberating desire from addict such that the patient may pursue desire free of the burdening connotations of addiction, danger, and ravaging. To be sure, this example illustrates a process that is typical rather than remarkable. So often our work involves helping patients appreciate the specific and textured senses of the words they have chosen to utter. Yet this would not be necessary or helpful if words were devoid of personal meaning. The goal of this type of exploration differs from that of helping patients understand the meanings of the words they cannot utter because those words are not accessible to consciousness. It is also different from the exploration of unconscious dynamics hinted at by a word or its sound, as in a joke or slip of the tongue where a word’s meaning is not what it appears to be. Indeed, although verbal interpretation of unconscious content is the embattled star of our story of therapeutic action, a crucial supporting role is played by the frequent task of helping patients understand what they are saying. Exploration of the personal senses of words makes it possible to reconsider and perhaps rework their meanings. Patients, like poets, choose their words to express a precise meaning, to communicate a feeling, or to create an effect using sense and rhythm; unlike poets, they may be unaware of the desire to do any of these. In this sense, spontaneous speech is unwitting poetry. Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Queen Mary, University of London on March 16, 2015

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The idea that words denoting abstract concepts, such as addict and river, have personal, idiosyncratic resonances is inconsistent with the widely accepted theory that memories of abstract knowledge such as word meanings, concepts, and facts (i.e., semantic memory) are stored separately from autobiographical memories of personal experiences (i.e., episodic memory; Tulving 1972). Yet theory and research dating back to the 1980s (e.g., Hintzman 1986), in concert with current neuroscience research (e.g., Greenberg and Verfaellie 2010), suggests that words are not stored in a purely abstract form, even in adulthood (Goldinger 1998), and that episodic and semantic memory are “more interactive than they are distinct” (Sheldon and Moscovitch 2012, p. 1452) or even “fully integrated within a single system,” with the hippocampus as its hub (Battaglia, Borensztajn, and Bod 2012, p. 1637). For example, Sheldon and Moscovitch (2012) demonstrated that some semantic processing tasks both draw on episodic memories and activate brain regions associated with episodic memory retrieval, specifically the medial temporal lobe (MTL), which includes the hippocampus. While their brains were scanned with fMRI, participants made lists of twelve items of three types: autobiographical information (e.g., names of friends), semantic information presumed to be learned abstractly (e.g., positions in government), and semantic information presumed to be learned through personal experience (e.g., items found in a kitchen). MTL activation was greatest for retrieval of semantic information learned through personal experience, and, for those tasks only, MTL activation increased as the task progressed. Responses to that task were also unique in that items became increasingly idiosyncratic as participants generated list items; by contrast, autobiographical list entries were uniformly idiosyncratic (i.e., different across participants) and abstract semantic list entries were uniformly general (i.e., similar across participants). Based on this pattern of results, the researchers surmised that participants first used automatic semantic strategies to name prototypical items (e.g., spoon and knife found in all kitchens) and increasingly drew on personal memory to name idiosyncratic items from their own experiences (e.g., apple corer found in their own kitchen) as the task progressed. Thus, as time elapsed, participants drew more heavily on their personal memories as they processed a certain type of word, a finding generally consistent with the idea that personal associations constitute the meaning of some words and that those associations are available to emerge through the psychoanalytic conversation. 1120



WORD MEANINGS ARE EMBODIED

The second implication of the fact that word meanings are learned is that words are by nature embodied, having grown out of sensuous lived experiences, including those of the intimate relationships with treasured others from whom words are first learned. Word meanings are not inherently abstract but potentially experiential. No one helps us understand the earliest experiential foundations of language better than Hans Loewald. Loewald offers us a psychoanalytic theory of the nature of language, which takes account of the ways in which language is interwoven through the essential developments of early life. For Loewald (1978), language “ties together human beings and self and object world, and it binds abstract thought with the bodily concreteness and power of life” (p. 204). This is because language, in the form of the sounds of mother’s speech, imbues the infant’s lived experience from the beginning of life. The sounds of mother’s speech are part of the infant’s experience of interacting with the mother, and over time those sounds become differentiated from other sensations of the lived world as a special kind of sound; these special sounds grow into words. But the sounds also remain connected in memory to the rest of experience and for that reason are a powerful way to recall one’s inner experience and communicate it to another. Indeed, the lived feeling that language can create is a reflection of its experiential nature. Although the semantic possibilities of words expand over development, they do not overtake the experiential possibilities. A word is always an experiential memory. That said, the admixture of abstractness and aliveness in the word can vary dynamically (Loewald 1978). Much of the time, adult thinking requires suppression of the experiential memory inherent in language, so that language can assist with rational abstract thought without being weighed down by experiential particulars. Over development, children become able to understand and use words in increasingly abstract ways; yet this common, adaptive usage of language need not be confused with its nature. On the other hand, the experiential aspect can sometimes overwhelm the semantic, as in a kind of enactment in which words are more like things, like part of the action, than like symbols. Ideally, the word is neither wholly separate from its experiential foundations nor wholly merged in it. The ability to use language in a flexible way that meets the demands of particular meanings, with the right mix of rationality and expressiveness, is a sign of psychological maturity, as well as of the poet’s talent. Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Queen Mary, University of London on March 16, 2015

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From this point of view, a word is an auditory aspect of a lived experience that comes to represent that experience; because the word emerges from the experience, it can later evoke it in a multisensorial way. Moreover, individuals differ in the sensory modes through which they experience and process words, carrying forward specific aspects of the original experiences that inhere in words; correspondingly, the type of sensory experience evoked by words may reflect one’s characteristic way of taking in the world, perhaps starting with the early relational world. Just as poets experience specific perceptual relationships to the poem, as words on a printed page to be seen, as the sound of spoken words to be heard; many analysts have a primary sensory modality through which they experience the words they hear: visual, tactile, auditory, kinesthetic (Chodorow 2012). I mentioned that river to me is the Hudson River. I will now add that I carry a specific visual image that I can see, if I think about it, in response to the word: From its high banks, I see the majestic Hudson River coursing past rural Dutchess County on a bright day. You may bring not only a different river to this word, but also a different perceptual experience of that river, perhaps a kinesthetic bodily experience of floating or swimming or even drowning. Or an auditory experience, such as hearing the river rush past the shore or gurgle over rocks. This conception of words as entwined with aspects of lived experience is consistent with the contemporary view of language as embodied (see, e.g., Lakoff and Johnson 1980), which allows that language can have somatic and experiential concomitants, consequences, or both (see also Fonagy and Target 2007; Vivona 2009). With a similar conception of words in mind, Ogden (1999) advocates “a form of listening that is responsive to the rich reverberations of sound and multi-layered meanings that lie at the heart of both poetry and psychoanalysis” (p. 989), and contrasts this with attempts to listen “through language” into some presumably deeper meaning that is not in language itself (for a related argument, see Priel 2003). WORDS ARE IMBUED WITH EMOTION

The third implication of the learned nature of the link between word and meaning is that a word can carry with it, as part of its memorial meaning, emotional aspects of the lived experiences within which the word is learned and used. Emotion in speech does not come exclusively from the

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tones of the speaker’s voice. Words themselves may carry feeling reminiscent of the tone of voice in which they were originally spoken and the lived relational contexts in which they were originally heard and used. Words can carry emotion because they were spoken, not only when they are spoken. Words, then, are potentially emotion-laden rather than inherently emotion-neutral. When we consider the origins of language in the intimacy of interpersonal relationships and of language as speech sounds woven through the infant’s sensuous world, we see that emotional tone of voice and semantic meaning are not at first separate aspects of words. Rather, vocal tone and semantic meaning are entwined in the infant’s aural experience because people speak to infants with an exaggerated emotional prosody known as infant-directed speech, in which the “melodies” of speech are consistent with the semantic message, and help to carry it along (Fernald 1989). This amplified emotional speech, in which tone and meaning are married, is everyone’s first language; infants prefer it, listen carefully to it, and derive meanings from it. Not until the third year of life are children able to derive meanings from adult-directed speech, with its relatively neutral affective tone (Ma et al. 2011). Thus, the ability to understand the semantic meaning of words separate from the tone in which they are spoken is a developmental achievement, rather than the starting point for language. In developmental terms, emotional tone of voice is not something added to words, like the proverbial icing on the cake. Neutral speech has had its emotional tone removed, like desalinated ocean water. A woman entered psychotherapy with the therapeutic goal of talking, for the first time, about the extensive physical and sexual abuse she had experienced as a child, overwhelming yet vague memories of which haunted her day and night. The task filled her with dread. For a long time she began each session with a three-word sentence: “I feel mad” or “I feel sad” or “I feel bad.” Usually I could not tell which of the rhyming adjectives she had spoken, so hurriedly did she say the words, in such an anguished way, head down, eyes averted from me. Like an angry child forced to apologize, I thought, as though the words were not an expression of her inner state but a submission to a demand. After she had produced these three words, she would fall into a tortured silence, which sometimes lasted thirty minutes. She squirmed in her chair, her mouth twitching violently. She dared not look at me. She was so afraid of me during those silences that I sometimes feared myself. I watched helplessly as she suffered, anxiously searching my mind for something to say, Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Queen Mary, University of London on March 16, 2015

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wanting to offer some comfort, to bring the wretched silence to an end. But if I spoke during the silence, the patient recoiled from me; I saw and felt her retreat. It was as though my words caused a timer to be reset; the silence started over from the beginning. I learned to hold my tongue and stay silently with her until the storm had passed, until she was ready to speak again. She had to be the one to break the silence; she could not allow me to break in on her. Talking with me was an absolute terror for her, and she needed time to work up the courage to say more than her initial sentence. I understood so much about this woman’s inner experience from her body language, facial expressions, and tone of voice, which was a mixture of fury, terror, and desperation, as well as from the spasms of fear and helplessness I experienced in her presence. What more could her sparse words tell me? I feel mad. I feel sad. I feel bad. These are the simple sentences a young child would use to state her specific feeling. Yet the tone and delivery of each sentence was the same; the awful silence that followed each sentence felt the same. For these reasons, I thought of the sentences as synonymous, as though it did not matter which adjective the patient spoke. Given her history of early trauma, this semantic vagueness might reflect the patient’s difficulty knowing and articulating her emotional experience (Fonagy and Target 2008), as though this was the best she could do with words. Given the intensity of the nonsemantic communications, the semantic subtleties of the patient’s speech seemed unimportant. Only slowly, as we lived this moment session after session, did I come to realize that speaking in this way served a purpose. It allowed the patient to avoid differentiating the meanings of her words, while also hiding that avoidance. That is, the definitive cadence of her statements (I feel . . .) belied her unspoken confused questions: Am I mad or am I sad? Do I feel bad or am I bad? Did I do something bad, or did someone do something bad to me? Over many months, we came to see that the patient feared articulating these questions because she expected that doing so would confront her with the full horror of her early experiences, as well as with unbearable feelings toward the caretakers who had perpetuated them. In moments such as this, the semantic contribution of words to therapeutic action does not involve their usual function, the articulation of inner experiences and ideas. Indeed, the patient’s inner turmoil was revealed through her facial expressions, body postures, and vocal tone, as well as through the countertransference, not through the content of her 1124



sparse words. Yet the marriage of tone and semantics in the patient’s speech intimated a crucial meaning of her experience, which was not accessible through purely nonsemantic modes. Indeed, this meaning emerged at the intersection of semantics, grammatical form, linguistic sound, and tone of voice and in the context of the patient’s body postures and facial expressions. Specifically, disparity between tone of voice and bodily expressions on the one hand and semantic meaning and speech rhythm on the other betokened the patient’s motivated refusal to acknowledge the questions that underlay her words. The patient’s language was not poetic in any usual sense, yet it conveyed meaning through a juxtaposition of semantics and sound that is also at work in Collins’s poem; however, in this case the effect was tragic rather than comic. FORM AND MEANING

To this point I have argued that words have personal, embodied, and emotional foundations that are mobilized in speech as in poetry. Yet even this expanded view is not the whole story if it seems to imply that the meaning of language lies in the meaning of words. As we see in the case vignette, the form of a communication is an aspect of its meaning. To give a generic example, when we phrase an interpretation as a question, we change its meaning from an assertion (I believe this to be so) to an invitation (What do you think?). Language is action whose meaning is not limited to semantics, even embodied semantics, but also inheres in the composition and evolution of verbal expression. Although psychoanalysts have contrasted the vagaries of verbal and nonverbal communications, we have not fully explored ways in which verbal form, in the utterances of both patient and analyst, shapes meaning. A brief detour into literary criticism will help to illuminate the importance of verbal form and the limitations attendant in considering the meaning of language in terms of content alone. For the literary critic Helen Vendler (1988), the essence of a poem is not that it is about something but that it does something through the form and content of its words. Consequently, the meaning of a poem cannot be separated from the specific verbal form the poet gives it. She demonstrates the loss of meaning that comes from ignoring a poem’s form through a critique of Lionel Trilling’s psychoanalytic interpretation (1950) of Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” Trilling assumes that “a poem is a discourse rather than an action” Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Queen Mary, University of London on March 16, 2015

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(Vendler 1988, p. 94) and reads the Ode as an ambivalent lament for the lost innocence of childhood. Vendler asserts that Trilling misconstrues the poem because he focuses on what it says, and ignores how it speaks; thus, he “detaches the sentiments of the Ode from the only medium in which they can live, the medium of their language” (p. 94). Attending to the subtle yet profound shifts in the types of metaphors Wordsworth uses across the poem, Vendler finds the Ode to be not a lament for lost innocence but a tribute to the wondrous meaning-making of the mature mind, a tribute to metaphor itself, which is the form, hero, and accomplishment of the poem. The Ode is altogether a different poem when its form is appreciated as a source of meaning. The original form of language encountered by the infant is the emotionally alive speech of a special person with whom the infant interacts; that speech is addressed to the infant and emerges from and gives meaning to the lived experiences they share, of which speaking, looking, and touching are a part. This form of language conveys to the infant the semantic meaning of words along with the speaker’s attitudes about the world and the infant’s relationship to it (Vivona 2012). Through speaking, the speaker enacts her intention to communicate, to reach the infant with words, and to show the infant how to do the same, intentions even young infants have been shown to infer (Csibra 2010). Through speech, the speaker’s mind becomes manifest to the infant. The infant learns more than word meanings. Through interactions with speakers, the infant learns the possibilities of verbal communication, in particular the potential to know and affect the mind of the other through words. In the same way, psychoanalytic talking is not discourse, not merely dissemination of content; it is action effected through words that cannot be understood apart from its verbal medium. The fact that the interpretation, and often the resulting insight, is expressed in words has channeled our understanding of the therapeutic action of speech. We have tended to consider the interpretation primarily in terms of its content and thus as a way to disseminate information that, when effective, expands the patient’s self-knowledge (Eagle 2011). Beginning with Freud, psychoanalysts realized that this left something out (Friedman 2002), and an expanding array of purportedly extralinguistic processes have been proposed to fill the gap, beginning with affect (e.g., emotional insight) and moving toward experiential and/or relational processes, many of which are presumed to operate outside of language (see, e.g., Curtis 2012; BCPSG 2005). The importance of these other processes notwithstanding, we have 1126



tended to overlook the textured meanings communicated through verbal form. Poetry brings those meanings into focus. P S YC H O A N A LY S I S A S P O E T R Y

We are now ready to take this expanded view of language into our consideration of the therapeutic conversation, broadening our scope from monologue to dialogue to contemplate the ways in which talking in psychoanalysis mobilizes the potentials of language that we admire in poetry. To do so, we take account of both the memorial, embodied, affective potentials of words and the use and evolution of the verbal form across the session and over the relationship. A man in psychotherapy was expressing a new realization that he is dependent on others, especially women, for his sense of self-worth. He had not known this about himself, and he was surprised to realize that he could not seem to enjoy his independent pursuits. He needed women to give him a sense that he is special and loved. Yet his recent anguished searching for validation from women had left him anxious and confused. He was certain his friends would be scandalized by his actions; he expected yet did not sense this judgment from me. After we talked this over for a while, the patient paused and said, “I guess my problem is I don’t love myself enough. I don’t feel the self-love that other people feel.” I noticed that I felt strangely uncomfortable with the simplicity of this statement about self-love. There was something so direct and plain about it. For a moment, I wanted to object, as though something important was being left out. Then I realized that his usual tone of negative self-judgment was missing. This was a statement of how he is, uncomplicated by his feelings about it being so. I realized, too, that this is the way I try to speak to him, with a tone of empathy rather than judgment, something we had just been exploring. My strange feeling came in recognizing the tone, cadence, and intention of my own words coming back to me through him. An interpretation I might have made came from him: I do these things because I do not love myself enough. Then he asked me, “Why don’t I love myself? Do you know?” It was the final moment of the session. I spoke without pausing to think, “We don’t come into the world knowing we are lovable. We have to learn that.” I said this matter-of-factly and as I heard myself speak, I worried that my tone sounded didactic, perhaps even patronizing. I heard myself say “we” rather than “you,” and became aware of making a statement that Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Queen Mary, University of London on March 16, 2015

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patently applied to me as well as to him. The patient looked at me with a start. He said, “Really? Is that true?” He was taken aback. After a pause, he added excitedly, “I didn’t know that. This is really important.” He left beaming. I was surprised by his delight in a statement I considered insipid at best. In the following session, he offered a new metaphor through which to understand his frantic efforts to feel validated and satisfied. He said, “I’m like a man who has lived on lentils all my life and now I’m gorging myself at the Hyatt buffet.” His gorging is understandable, “even normal,” he said, in light of his lifelong limited diet, which had left him neither starving nor satisfied. The patient began by reflecting on my nonjudgmental attitude toward him, which I had expressed to him, shown him in words, many times throughout our work together. Then he tried out this way of thinking himself, on himself, creating a self-interpretation that expressed a view of himself that I recognized as similar to mine, as different from his usual way. His interpretation became possible as he internalized the consistent attitude I had expressed toward him through the content, tone, and intention of my speech. This atmosphere of receding judgment was the context for his brave question, “Why don’t I love myself?” In response to both the urgency of his question and the pressure of the end of the hour, I expressed the truth as it came to me in that moment. The patient immediately saw something true and transformative about himself in my dispassionate aphorism about people, including the two of us. He grasped the implications of thinking about himself in this new way: “This is important.” And what of his excited amazement? For Vendler (1988), works of art evoke a response of aesthetic “delight.” She does not mean that we understand the work of art, or that it understands us. She means that we have a special resonance with it as a creation that, in the confluence of form and content, stirs something in us. The patient’s delighted amazement in this resonant moment was not the effect of receiving new information about the human condition but of realizing something meaningful about himself, both personal and interpersonally shared. Both psychoanalysis and poetry depend on the ability to create new meanings in language. “Language,” wrote Loewald (1960), “in its most specific function in analysis, as interpretation, is thus a creative act similar to that in poetry where language is found for phenomena, contexts, connections, and experiences not previously known and speakable” (p. 242). Words are transformative because of the experiences they can 1128



evoke and create. Words can connect self to other, thought to feeling, present to past, and present to future. The right words awaken their experiential foundations to just the right degree, in sympathy with the lived moment. Semantics and sound are married in the word in a particular way, evoking experience. Because language is always action, psychoanalysis and poetry foster an interpersonal sharing of both meaning and understanding. The experience of hearing a good poem or a good interpretation is of being understood and at the same time seeing something new about oneself that has been articulated by someone else from within that person’s own experience. The change that can happen on hearing such language we call insight. Insight is not only knowledge, not only content. It is an experience of resonance with another person’s vision of things. The verbal form is both shape and substance of the interpretation, as it is of the poem. Put another way, the interpretation resonates when its content, tone, and form are right. Indeed, the form of my response to the patient’s question was crucial. Because I expressed my thought as a general truth, I countered the patient’s tendency toward self-criticism by stating indirectly that he is neither defective nor blameworthy for being as he is. Of course, this was not something I planned. Only in retrospect did it occur to me that this particular form of expression, a general statement delivered without discernible emotion, was the kind this man would be likely to take in. By contrast, I recalled other moments when I expressed my genuine emotion with words and tone of voice (“How sad”) and was stunned by his vigorous rejection of such “therapist talk” that smacked, to him, of generic technique. The emotion, my emotion, often got in the way for him. For this patient, neutral desalinated speech was more evocative, in that it left more room for his own emotional experience to emerge, than was my speech with its feeling intact. Within a new empathic understanding of himself, the patient was freed to relate to himself metaphorically. During the following session, the patient used metaphor to mold the understanding of himself that we were developing to fit better with his sense that he had been taught to love himself, but in a limited way, for a certain way of being. Yet there is so much more to him than a taste for lentils. Vendler (1988) asks, “What else is metaphor but a conferral of colors on the neutral world, an introduction of pathos where before there was only fact?” (p. 98). For both the patient and the poet, metaphor is an accomplishment that allows him to move


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beyond fact and toward meaning. Such language transforms the momentary into the enduring, allowing other moments to be experienced and lived in new ways. This new experiencing becomes possible as the patient learns from the analyst, as apprentice learns from poet, to use language poetically as a way to see himself and thus to relate to himself and to others in new ways. As we have seen, individual relational development leaves its mark not only on the meanings of words, but also on one’s sense of the kinds of experiences, ideas, and feelings that can be expressed in words, the things one can and cannot do with words. The child who learns that words are empty, or that words are meant for trickery and deceit, will not become a poet. Such beliefs about language, implicit in every utterance, may squelch one’s nascent hope in the communicative and transformative potentials of speaking (Rizzuto 2004). Yet as the patient experiences the psychoanalytic conversation, her beliefs about language itself can begin to change and the potential scope of both verbal content and verbal form can enlarge. Thus, not only does psychoanalysis bring about the possibility that the patient may speak about previously unspeakable matters; it also enhances the patient’s capacity to use the potentials of language, that is, to make use of the experiential foundations of words and to mobilize new verbal forms, and thereby to make new meanings. S P E A K I N G O F R E L AT I O N S H I P S

And this is where the analogy between poetry and the psychoanalytic conversation begins to break down. Spoken language in psychoanalysis, unlike the language of a poem, constitutes a relational act toward a specific other who is present and whose response may be wished for or feared, elicited or thwarted, and certainly gauged. Although the poet and her reader may have a relationship, they do not interact. Words reach their fullest potential as speech in relationships. It is to the relational potentials of spoken words, which are not revealed in poetry, that I now turn. A woman struggled greatly to speak with me when we were together in session, experiencing and expressing her intense discomfort and anxiety with fidgeting hands, jiggling feet, averted eyes. Yet after the session, she often sent her detailed thoughts to me in an e-mail, articulating quite precisely what kept her from talking to me and what she did not say. She could do this because writing and being read are not the same as speaking and being heard. 1130



In Loewald’s writings is an exposition of the relational potentials of language. In this passage from “Psychoanalysis as an Art and the Fantasy Character of the Psychoanalytic Situation,” Loewald (1975) addresses a controversy brewing in the mid-1970s over the relative therapeutic importance of insight versus relationship experiences, notably Franz Alexander’s “corrective emotional experience,” a debate that continues to this day: I wish to point out that it is the very fact of the analyst’s ability to show the patient the role the latter has assigned to him and the genesis of this assignment—it is this empathic objectivity of the analyst, perceived by the patient, that carries the potentiality for change. It is neither insight in the abstract, nor any special display of a benevolent or warm attitude on the part of the analyst. What seems to be of essential importance is insight or selfunderstanding as conveyed, as mediated by the analyst’s empathic understanding, objectively stated in articulate and open language. . . . If defenses do not interfere, it is experienced by patient and analyst alike as authentic responsiveness. This responsiveness is an essential element in what we call emotional insight because it frees the patient for nondefensive responses of his own. Interpretations of this kind explicate for the patient what he then discovers to have always known somehow, but in the absence of its recognition and explication by the analyst such knowledge could not be grasped and acknowledged [pp. 360–361; emphasis added].

For Loewald, the relationship between analyst and patient fosters change when the analyst can articulate, clearly and with empathy, the nature of the relational experiences in which the two participate. It is not insight in the abstract that helps, not the dissemination of ideas separate from the emotional relational context that brings those ideas to mind. It is not warm or benevolent actions or attitudes, not the way the analyst is or seems, separate from what he thinks and says. It is the use of speech to articulate, with an attitude of empathy and openness, what is being experienced in relation to the other and the meaning that can be made of that experience. The interpretation is the analyst’s authentic, empathic response to the patient (see also Spivak 2011). It offers the patient not only a new idea about herself but also a new way of thinking about herself, a different coloring of the facts. This kind of speech is therapeutic when it can be internalized by the patient so that she too can think about herself in such ways (Loewald 1960). In relational terms, an interpretation is an interpersonal moment of an extended conversation taking place between two people in a special Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Queen Mary, University of London on March 16, 2015

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relationship; indeed, the relationship is structured so that this type of conversation can take place. Interpretation is the outgrowth of the collaborative process of these two people speaking and making meaning together. Interpretation is part of this process, indicates the process, and moves the process along. Consequently, though it may be clear enough who the speaker of an interpretation is, its authorship is always ambiguous. To return to the case material, the spontaneous aphorism was part of a particular collaborative exchange, preceded by and founded on the work of the hour, including the patient’s self-interpretation, and the work of the relationship as a whole, including the patient’s repeated experience of finding himself not judged by me for thoughts, feelings, and actions that he believed I would criticize. Of course, the same comment would not have conveyed the same meaning if said to a different person, if spoken within a different relationship. In general, I suspect, a matterof-fact statement would be more likely to activate defenses than to bypass them. Analysts and patients alike vary in the extent to which they resonate with and make use of the elements within speech, and within the psychoanalytic situation generally (Chodorow 2012). One’s characteristic resonances reveal the hopes with which speech is imbued. Indeed, poetry shows us not only the breadth of things the word can do, but also the scope of one’s particular vision of the word. Some of us are drawn to the breezy, wry tone of Billy Collins, whose poems belie their significance and purpose; we delight in the clever clarity of the word. Some are moved by the exuberance of Walt Whitman; we rejoice in the expressive vigor of the word. Some are captivated by the enigmatic imagery of William Carlos Williams; we are intrigued by the word that is more than it appears to be. Some are engaged less by poetry than by music or dance; we feel meaning coursing without words through the body. Indeed, meaning takes many forms, and words participate in meaning in many ways. Because language is the legacy of individual development, each person’s language is a unique admixture of the communicative potentials of the word. Consequently, each member of the analytic pair faces the challenge of engaging with the other’s ways of using and receiving words, as well as the other’s accommodations to the limitations of words as he or she conceives them. To be sure, some patients use words in a limited way; some analysts are acutely attuned to meanings conveyed without words. Yet an important therapeutic task is to bring meanings into the verbal form, as happens when the analyst speaks her thoughts to the patient. 1132



Just as there is no generic good poem or good art, there is no generic good interpretation. On the contrary, for the interpretation to do its work, the meanings active in the shared relational moment must be articulated by the speaker in language whose precise content, tone, and form creates resonance in the listener and thus is experienced as something valuable and true. Moreover, for the words to foster change, the enacted meaning must be communicated by the person with whom it has been experienced. It is the immediacy and specificity of the experience, and of shared understanding, that help us bypass defenses that would otherwise undermine the therapeutic moment. To the extent that the analyst is a poet, he is a proxy-poet, in that he attempts to bring words to or out of an experience that may not be his own, or perhaps would not be were he not in the therapeutic relationship with this patient. This is not to say that the experience itself necessarily involves the therapeutic relationship or the transference; it is to say that such moments involve the patient and analyst experiencing something meaningful together, and that their speech participates in, as well as reflects, that meaning. This explains why, despite its exemplary language, a poem cannot do the work of psychoanalysis. Conversely, there is no speech, and no interpretation, separate from the interpersonal relationship in which the words are created and heard. It is not simply that both insight and relationship are necessary therapeutic mechanisms. We cannot consider one without considering the other; they are inseparable phenomena, each constituting the other. On the one hand, we cannot know the meaning of the words, or the meaning of speaking and listening and being heard, without taking account of the relationship in which the conversation occurs. On the other hand, we cannot appreciate the potentials of the relationship without acknowledging that it is conveyed, powerfully even if not entirely, through speech. We cannot take the words out of the relationship in which they are uttered and heard. We cannot dissect the insights that emerge through this relationship from the experience of the emotional, responding, speaking presence of another human being. That the meaning takes the form of speech between psychoanalyst and patient is not beside the point; it is the point. Conceptually, of course, we can differentiate the words spoken and heard from the feelings and experiences that make up an interpersonal relationship. Some in our field have done just that, and have attributed different therapeutic effects to these different aspects of the psychoanalytic situation, new insights to the content of the speech between analyst and Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Queen Mary, University of London on March 16, 2015

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patient, and new ways of being to unspoken relational experiences. However, at least most of the relational experiences, such as feeling understood or important or neglected, that are attributed to unspoken relationship factors are possible because of the kind of talking that takes place within and thus constitutes the therapeutic relationship. Not only is the content of that talking unique, but so is its special form and the way that special general form is realized within each dyad and infuses each therapeutic moment. Indeed, when we think about the therapeutic relationship as carried out through conversation, and when we keep in mind the many personal, experiential, memorial, and relational potentials of words, then it becomes ironically clear that any opposition of insight and relationship as therapeutic mechanisms is one of those false dichotomies that language so easily depicts, despite their being untrue. The work of the analyst is to create language that mobilizes the experiential, memorial, and relational potentials of words, and in so doing to make a poet out of the patient so that she too can create such language. It is not special language that they create; it is everyday language used in a special way, made possible by the special relationship they share. In Freud’s fabulous words from “The Question of Lay Analysis,” “Nothing takes place between them except that they talk to each other” (1926, p. 187). Their talk uses the fullest relational potentials of words to evoke, convey, enact, connect, reveal, and transform. It is hard work, indeed. This is why we, like the poet, need the quiet room. REFERENCES

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Boston Change Process Study Group (2008). Forms of relational meaning: Issues in the relations between the implicit and reflective-verbal domains. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 18:125–148. Bucci, W. (1997). Psychoanalysis and Cognitive Science: A Multiple Code Theory. New York: Guilford Press. Caston, J. (2007). Poetic closure, psychoanalytic termination, and death. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 55:7–30. Charles, M. (2010). Epiphany: The poet’s art, the analyst’s instrument. Formal structure as a vehicle for the expression of primary experience. Psychoanalytic Review 97:451–467. Chodorow, N.J. (2012). Analytic listening and the five senses: Introduction. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 60:747–758. Collins, B. (1988). Fishing on the Susquehanna in July. In Picnic, Lightning. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, pp. 7–9. Csibra, G. (2010). Recognizing communicative intentions in infancy. Mind & Language 25:141–168. Curtis, R. (2012). New experiences and meanings: A model of change for psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Psychology 29:81–98. Damasio, A. (1999). The Feeling of What Happens. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Eagle, M. (2011). Classical theory, the Enlightenment Vision, and contemporary psychoanalysis. In The Second Century of Psychoanalysis: Evolving Perspectives on Therapeutic Action, ed. M.J. Diamond & C. Christian. London: Karnac Books, pp. 41–67. Fernald, A. (1989). Intonation and communicative intent in mother’s speech to infants: Is the melody the message? Child Development 60: 1497–1510. Fonagy, P., & Target, M. (2007). The rooting of the mind in the body: New links between attachment theory and psychoanalytic thought. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 55:411–456. Fonagy, P., & Target, M. (2008). Attachment, trauma, and psychoanalysis. In Mind to Mind: Infant Research, Neuroscience, and Psychoanalysis, ed. E.L. Jurist, A. Slade, & S. Bergner. New York: Other Press, pp. 15–49. Freud, S. (1890). Psychical (or mental) treatment. Standard Edition 7: 283–302. Freud, S. (1926). The question of lay analysis: Conversations with an impartial person. Standard Edition 20:183–250. Friedman, L. (2002). What lies beyond interpretation, and is that the right question? Psychoanalytic Psychology 19:540–551. Goldinger, S.D. (1998). Echoes of echoes? An episodic theory of lexical access. Psychological Review 105:251–279. Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Queen Mary, University of London on March 16, 2015

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Greenberg, D.L., & Verfaellie, M. (2010). Interdependence of episodic and semantic memory: Evidence from neuropsychology. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society 16:748–753. Harris, A. (1992). Dialogues as transitional space: A rapprochement of psychoanalysis and developmental linguistics. In Relational Perspectives in Psychoanalysis, ed. N.J. Skolnick & S.C. Warsaw. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, pp. 119–146. Hintzman, D.L. (1986). “Schema Abstraction” in a multiple-trace memory model. Psychological Review 93:411–428. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Litowitz, B.E. (2007). The second person. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 55:1129–1149. Litowitz, B.E. (2011). From dyad to dialogue: Language and the early relationship in American psychoanalytic theory. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 59:483–508. Loewald, H.W. (1960). On the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis. In Papers on Psychoanalysis. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980, pp. 221–256. Loewald, H.W. (1975). Psychoanalysis as an art and the fantasy character of the psychoanalytic situation. In Papers on Psychoanalysis. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980, pp. 352–371. Loewald, H.W. (1978). Primary process, secondary process, and language. In Papers on Psychoanalysis. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980, pp. 178–206. Ma, W., Golinkoff, R., Houston, D.M., & Hirsh-Pasek, K. (2011). Word learning in infant- and adult-directed speech. Language Learning & Development 7:185–201. Martin, L. (1986). Eskimo words for snow: A case study in the genesis and decay of an anthropological example. American Anthropologist 88:418–422. Ogden, T.H. (1999). ‘The music of what happens’ in poetry and psychoanalysis. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 80:979–994. Parsons, M. (2007). Raiding the inarticulate: The internal analytic setting and listening beyond countertransference. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 88:1441–1456. Priel, B. (2003). Psychoanalytic interpretations: Word-music and translation. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 84:131–142. Ramachandran, V.S., & Hubbard, E.M. (2001). Synaesthesia: A window into perception, thought and language. Journal of Consciousness Studies 8(12):3–34.

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Rizzuto, A.-M. (2004). Paradoxical words and hope in psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Psychology 21:203–213. Saussure, F. de (1915). Course in General Linguistics, transl. W. Baskin. New York: Philosophical Library, 1959. Seiden, H.M. (2004). On the ‘music of thought’: The use of metaphor in poetry and in psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Psychology 21:638–644. Shaddock, D. (2010). The opening of the field: Thoughts on the poetics of psychoanalytic treatment. Psychoanalytic Inquiry 30:243–253. Sheldon, S., & Moscovitch, M. (2012). The nature and time‐course of medial temporal lobe contributions to semantic retrieval: An fMRI study on verbal fluency. Hippocampus 22: 1451–1466. Spivak, A.P. (2011). The interpretive act: Returning freedom and agency to a beleaguered ego. In The Second Century of Psychoanalysis: Evolving Perspectives on Therapeutic Action, ed. M.J. Diamond & C. Christian. London: Karnac Books, pp. 121–144. Stern, D.N. (1985). The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology. New York: Basic Books. Trilling, L. (1950). The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. New York: Viking Press. Tulving, E. (1972). Episodic and semantic memory. In Organization of Memory. Oxford, UK: Academic Press. Vendler, H. (1988). The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Vivona, J.M. (2003). Embracing figures of speech: The transformative potential of spoken language. Psychoanalytic Psychology 20:52–66. Vivona, J.M. (2009). Embodied language in neuroscience and psychoanalysis. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 57:1327–1360. Vivona, J.M. (2012). Is there a nonverbal period of development? Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 60:231–265. Williams, W.C. (1955). Asphodel, that greeny flower. In Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems. New York: New Directions, 1962, pp. 153–182. Willis, I. (2007). A working poet comments on Caston’s “Poetic closure, psychoanalytic termination, and death.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 55:43–45. Wilson, A., & Weinstein, L. (1992). Language and the psychoanalytic process: Psychoanalysis and Vygotskian psychology, part II. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 40:725–759. 11 Bala Avenue Bala Cynwyd, PA 19004 E-mail: [email protected]


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Medicine as poetry.

Psychoanalysis as a "normal" science.

Poetry.

Poetry Readings.

Psychoanalysis.

Poetry in decline?

Poetry: Sonnet on pain.

Nursing and poetry don't mix.

Poetry, decisions, and societal need.

Psychoanalysis naturalized.

Poetry therapy, men and masculinities.

The outlook for psychoanalysis.

Contemporary psychoanalysis and homosexuality.

Looking at Psychoanalysis.

Marriage and psychoanalysis.

Responding to Ebola through Visual Poetry.

Mary, dogma, and psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis and the couch.

Somatic correspondences during psychoanalysis.

MEMORY FOR POETRY: MORE THAN MEANING?

History of syphilis: between poetry and medicine.

Psychoanalysis' resistance to new ideas.

Psychoanalysis, child abuse and war.

On the efficacy of psychoanalysis.