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Mentalisation and metaphor in poetry and psychotherapy

Jeremy Holmes is a retired consultant psychiatrist in North Devon and Visiting Professor of Psychotherapy at the University of Exeter (Department of Clinical Psychology, University of Exeter, Exeter EX4 4QG, UK. Email: j.a.holmes{at}btinternet.com). He works part-time as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. His current professional interests include the psychotherapeutic implication of attachment theory, and common factors in psychotherapy. He occasionally writes a poem, never for publication.

People turn to poetry and to psychotherapy when in states of heightened emotion – love, elation, despair, death and loss. Through the analysis of a particular poem this article suggests that there are formal similarities between poetry and psychotherapy that can illuminate the workings of the latter. Perhaps the most overarching of these is mentalisation: the capacity to ‘think about feelings’ or to be ‘mind-minded’. Finding the ‘right words in the right order’ is a task for therapists and their patients as well as for poets, since the appropriate image or metaphor can mirror or evoke feelings in the listener in a way that facilitates empathic attunement. If feelings can be objectified, their power to distress or overwhelm is mitigated. Thus, poetry and psychotherapy are similarly concerned with processes of repair of the human experiential and communicative fabric.

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