Poetry and Psychoanalysis: The Opening of the Field

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.

David Shaddock, Ph.D., is an award-winning poet and psychotherapist. He is author of four books of poetry and two on couples therapy. His play In a Company of Seekers was performed at the 2012 Spoleto Arts Festival in Italy. He co-leads the couples therapy interest group for the International Association for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology.