Poetry and Psychoanalysis

The two disciplines have common points although they differ essentially

on one point: P-A is a therapeutic discipline that cures patients. Both use

associations and are close to onirism. Dreams and poems have much

in common through the mental images they create. Dreams can be written

down and elaborated through figurative language like poems so that

both processes can surface to consciousness once they are written

down and the secondary processes of elaboration takes over the

primary processes and the work of the preconscious mainly through

symbol formation. The convergence goes even further through

the oedipal work of the patient-doctor relationship that can

be compared to the writer-reader or poet-audience relation

and the place that "the other" occupies in the interaction.