Listening: Poetry as Depth Perception

Abstract

Reading poetry aloud is an extremely useful teaching method for therapists and analysts, one that attunes mind and ear to both self and other. To listen to a poem, one must be open to the experience of physical sensations, affects, silent registers and unknowingness that may take some time to begin to put into words. Becoming conscious of internal resonances coinciding with those of another is the basis for the clinical skills we are hoping to help trainees develop. Being present in an embodied way to the music of what is spoken also develops a heightened sense of effective uses of language in psychoanalytic writing. This paper offers several poems in very different styles in order to think about this process.

Keywords:

• analytic listening
• poetry
• teaching
• transitional phenomena
• Winnicott

Disclosure Statement

“American Sonnet” “I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison” from AMERICAN SONNETS FOR MY PAST AND FUTURE ASSASSIN by Terrance Hayes, copyright © 2018 by Terrance Hayes. Used by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alice A. Jones

Alice A. Jones, MD is a Personal and Supervising analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. Her books of poems include The Knot, Gorgeous Mourning, Plunge and Vault. She is the recipient of awards from the Poetry Society of America and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.