I am writing a book at the moment about poetry and therapy and it seems useful for me to reflect a bit on why poetry is such a potent force for psychological change⏤in my opinion, anyway⏤and below I will chuck around some ideas as to why.
So, here are some notes. Let’s dive in.
Self-Expression and Catharsis
All of the arts offer opportunities for self-expression and catharsis, which is the discharge of difficult emotions, and poetry is no different in this regard. We can get things out in a poem and have them represented on the page and therefore they are seen and witnessed. However, Poetry offers something more. It offers not only the opportunity to express experiences but also to contain them, through the use of metaphor and metre and a close attention to form⏤which is important, psychologically, when experiences are painful.
When the nineteenth century American poet Emily Dickinson writes (in poem 1129 in the collection known as the Belle of Amherst) the line ‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant’ she is talking about the capacity poetry has to contain experience by encoding it in image and form. In Dickinson’s poems it is often difficult to tell exactly what the truth she is writing about is⏤is it sexual abuse, or simply a description of Autumn, or both simultaneously? Approaching the truth indirectly, using metaphor, imagery, metonymy etc., means the poem’s message often remains closeted within the piece itself and is enigmatic. Another therapeutic benefit of poetry is the reading of it and the way in which we can project our experiences on to writing, perhaps finding something more out in the process⏤perhaps especially when the poem itself remains something of a mystery.
Taking a psychotherapeutic approach, we might say that using figuration in truth-telling makes a poem a container for truths which the conscious mind is not ready to integrate and in this way images protect⏤symbolisation protects us. Psychoanalysis tells us our dreams and fantasies and the stories we tell are encoded messages from our unconscious minds, giving hints about things that we are not willing to accept. Poems work in this way, too. Working these images into writing may be a first step in working the whatever-it-is through.
Poetry can also be a vehicle for transforming experiences in ways which make them easier to live with: images, metaphor, metonymy can all function to transfigure experience which is unlovely to something which reaches toward beauty⏤and perhaps towards something which has meaning. In John Milton’s Paradise Lost the character Lucifer, having been cast out of Heaven and now finding himself lying on a barren plain, speaks the line ‘The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven’. This is Milton offering an affirmation of the real power poetry has to transform ‘what is’ in ways which support the psyche.
Similarly in The Tempest the magician Prospero makes the island where he is exiled liveable through the use of language, through the ‘books’ which he drowns at the end when he renounces magic. Poetry is a kind of magic in this sense because it confers the ability to change things, to make things, to move things around. Poetry as a therapeutic tool allows the individual to re-fashion experiences in ways which make them easier to live with⏤either because we find the beauty in them, or the meaning⏤and because writing poetry gives us the agency to make things different.
Also, when we write we act in the world, and therefore we become an actor. Writing can give us sense of self-agency which can be profoundly transforming for someone who is perhaps in a pit of depression. In the pit of his depression and madness, the eighteenth century English poet John Clare writes ‘I am—yet what I am none cares or knows… and yet I am, and live’, and the words become a talisman allowing him to hang onto his selfhood in the face of the oblivion of depression. When we say ‘I’ we exist.
Words and Images
Images in poems do two things, or two main things, both of which interact with the psyche, with the imagination. The first thing images do is represent or stand for things or ideas (an important function, psychologically speaking, as I explain below) but they also do a second thing which is equally important, that is they open us up to the connections in language. For example, when we read the words ‘blue door’ in a poem we see what ‘blue door’ means to us and all of the things we connect with the words ‘blue’ and ‘door’ and the phrase ‘blue door’ when we put the words together. So, ‘blue’ might make us think of ‘sadness’ or, more specifically, the shoes we had when we were five years old; in the same way ‘door’ might make us think of ‘freedom’ or ‘confinement’ (or something else entirely⏤and perhaps the ‘blue door’ is the door on a particular house that was important to us. You get the point.
What I am saying is that words always carry, by association, other meanings than the ones they have in their current context in a given poem and that this gives our imagination material to work with. Whatever meaning is given to a particular word, in the psyche there are always other meanings at play⏤and these meanings link words together. This phenomenon is what the French psychoanalyst and theorist Jacques Lacan calls ‘the chain of signification’, which is how he thinks of language. Another important point about Lacan’s work is that he thinks about the human mind as made up of language⏤that is the representations of things in our mind are what we experience of reality. Language is how things are for us and why language is such a powerful tool for psychological change.
Poetry and the Symbolic Order
Julia Kristeva, the French-Bulgarian theorist and psychoanalyst, emphasises the role of symbolisation in the development of self-identity and mental health. Symbolisation is the process through which individuals assign meaning to their experiences, thoughts, and emotions, enabling them to navigate and make sense of the world around them; for Kristeva, language and literature, particularly poetry, serve as powerful tools in the quest for symbolisation.According to Kristeva, it is psychologically important for individuals to enter the symbolic realm of language due to its role in the development of self-identity and mental well-being. The symbolic refers to the realm of language and representation, where meaning is conveyed through words, signs, and symbols.
Kristeva argues that the symbolic is essential for psychological growth because it enables individuals to navigate and make sense of their experiences, thoughts, and emotions and engage in meaningful interactions with others, fostering a sense of belonging and social integration. Moreover, the symbolic (language) serves as the medium for the process of symbolisation, where individuals assign meaning to their experiences and emotions. By symbolising our experiences, we are able to transform them into something tangible and communicable. This process is crucial for mental health as it helps individuals gain a sense of control, understanding, and agency over their inner lives.
Furthermore, the symbolic nature of language enables individuals to engage in abstract thinking, conceptualisation, and problem-solving. It facilitates the development of higher cognitive functions and promotes intellectual growth. By entering the symbolic, individuals can expand their consciousness, challenge preconceived notions, and explore different perspectives, leading to personal and intellectual transformation.
Entering the symbolic realm of language also allows individuals to distance themselves from the immediacy of their experiences and gain perspective. Through language, we can reflect upon and express our emotions and thoughts, which contributes to emotional regulation and psychological well-being. It provides a means of introspection, self-reflection, and self-expression, enabling individuals to explore their inner world and develop a deeper understanding of themselves.
Given that the basis for poetry is the symbolic⏤the representation of experience in language, particularly language which is figurative and where one thing stands for another, as is the case with metaphor⏤it is not difficult to see why poems offer such opportunity for the psyche to establish a sense of self and assign meaning, to perform activities crucial to a sense of mental well-being.
As I said, Jacques Lacan goes further and states that the psyche is itself ‘structured like a language’ and identifies the earliest formation of the self as being co-incidental with our acquisition of language (in the mirror stage) at which point we move into the world of symbols and become a symbol ourselves, a complete person we call ‘I’. In Lacanian theory the exploration of the symbolic is essential for understanding and addressing psychological distress. It is also the place where the psyche ‘lives’, in the fabric of language (which Lacan calls the ‘chain of signification’), so we might say that at a fundamental psychological level we are all creatures of language.
Because poetry focusses on and foregrounds symbolisation as a mode it is a short step to see why the act of writing poetry might be so important. Finally, language as a system of meaning gives us something to explore: by playing with word connections we may discover something, gain some insight into the world or ourselves, that is new and that changes things for the better.
So…
Poetry is great. Give it a try.
Dr Stephanie Aspin 