Poetry and Therapy: Facing the Truth

Writing poetry can be an act of self-expression so intimate that many perform it in secret. When Emily Dickinson died in 1886, her sister Lavinia discovered about 1800 poems locked in a silver box, gathered together in sixty packets of loosely-sewn-together paper.

I want to focus on one thing, the truth-telling function of both poetry and psychotherapy . And in particular, the helping to bear the truth that each can entail.

Not everybody thinks that poets tell the truth. Plato, for instance, had little time for them and famously banned poets from his ideal city-state on the grounds that they were inclined to speak in other people’s voices and to don false personas. Actually, Plato had nothing against lies or propaganda, he just felt that they should only be perpetrated by the rulers of the state – the philosopher-kings. Poets said things that he thought would undermine the courage of soldiers. Homer said, ‘I would rather be a serf on the land of a poor portionless man who is not well to do, than rule over all the dead who have come to nought’. So although Plato accused poets of propagating falsehoods, he was, in fact, more worried about their subversive function in giving expression to proscribed thoughts and feelings. Not everybody thinks that analysts tell the truth, but it could be argued that they encourage such subversive acts within the internal politics of a person’s experience.

If psychoanalysis teaches us that unconscious mental defences are lies which a person tells himself in order to feel more comfortable, if repression is the poison of the mind, instigated by some internal spin-doctor, pushing us ever farther from the truth, then ‘reality confrontation’ must be mental medicine. But reality, both poets and analysts agree, is not easily assimilated. T.S. Eliot tells us that humankind cannot bear very much of it, and in one of Dickinson’s poems, she had written,

Tell all the truth but tell it slant –

Success in circuit lies.

Language allows us to do this. Because we can make one thing stand for another, we can manipulate symbols into literary tropes and conceits. Far from producing the uneasy sense which exposure to lies generates, the poet delivers together with his or her slanted truths a large packet of pleasure1.

This mysterious mind-candy enables us to accept what we would otherwise have repulsed. According to Freud, it lifts our repressions. But I do not agree that the primary function is simple wish-fulfilment in either case. If poets and psychotherapists only encouraged pleasurable phantasies, there would be little to distinguish them from pornographers. No, they are engaged in a different activity, not denying reality but celebrating it, somehow helping people to live their lives. Nothing could illustrate this better than the title poem to Roger McGough ’s collection, ‘The Way Things Are’ (Penguin, 1999). In a self- parodying homiletic discourse, a father attempts to disenchant his child – red woolly hats are not put on railings in order to keep them warm – and so on. The examples become increasingly surrealistic, each stanza ending with the (perhaps Lacanian) refrain, ‘I am your father and this is the way things are’. There is no opiate on offer, only the power of poetry used to reconcile the reader to existential pain. And then in the last four lines the reluctant realist’s apology,

No trusting hand awaits the falling star -

I am your father, and I am sorry,

but this is the way things are.

Notes

1. See Freud S. (1907 “Creative Writers and day-Dreaming”)