FREDERICK FEIRSTEIN
Trauma and Poetry: A Psychoanalyst's View
on the Healing Power of the Arts
S
INCE THE EARLIEST WRITINGS
of Freud and his followers, psycho–
analysts and critics have tried to construct theories of creativity
that link psychoanalysis and the arts. My ideas about the relation–
ship between psychoanalysis and creativity come from my work as a
psychoanalyst, from my writing poetry and plays, and from my
advanced seminars on symbolization and creativity. They have found
their way into my psychoanalytic writings and literary criticism having
to do with metaphor, dramatic structure, and meter and rhyme.
In thirty years of clinical work, I've learned to listen carefully for one
or two key metaphors that not only express unconscious fantasies but
perhaps more importantly lead to memories and repressed memories of
traumatic events . By bringing these metaphors into the psychoanalytic
dialogue and exploring their many permutations, I can help my patients
heal what Freud called "the split in the personality," thereby revising
and expanding their life narratives.
The mind/brain has a
natural
propensity to use metaphors and dra–
matic techniques for self-healing after trauma. Children usually and adults
often psychically reenact traumas in their dreams. Some people get relief
from such reenactments by turning its details into dream metaphors. Oth–
ers dramatize their traumas by making other characters in their dreams
suffer their trauma, with their "selves" watching.
In our waking life we naturally try to repair trauma by writing and
reading poetry and participating in the other arts. During the walling in
of the Warsaw Ghetto, for instance, right up until the boxcars were
sealed, there were more theatrical and musical performances, art
exhibits, and poetry readings than ever before in that city. Creativity has
a healing power.
It
gives writer and reader, painter and viewer, composer
and audience a safe place to reexperience emotions that have been
stunned into silence by making a bridge of metaphors connecting and
Frederick Feirstein is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City.
His most recent book is
New and Selected Poems .
