PART 1: Listening 1. Experiencing Language: Thoughts On Poetry And Psychoanalysis 2. Listening: Poetry as Depth Perception 3. Generating Words: Teaching Clinical Writing PART 2: Reading 4. Topographies: Psychic Landscapes of Seamus Heaney and Tomas Tranströmer 5. Linking Lost Voices: Reading “The Dead” 6. Poetry and Dreaming: Civitarese’s “Poetry of dream and de-personalization.” 7. Out of the Nest: The Poetry of Meena Alexander and Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge 8. All Along the Watchtower: Creativity and Emergence in Bob Dylan’s Poetry 9. Poetry and the Abyss: Reflections on the Work of Gregory Orr 10. Writing a Life: Reading Annie Ernaux PART 3: Ending 11. “Now We're Out of Time”: Endings in Poetry and Psychoanalysis 12. Ever Ending
Biography
Alice Jones is a physician, poet and psychoanalyst based in Berkeley, USA. A personal and consulting analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, she is the author of seven award-winning collections of poems and a mixed-genre memoir.
'Longing and loss, Alice Jones captures both the soul’s reaching out and, in life’s transience, its having to let go. Poiesis, making, the making of poetry and the making of analysis, are here interwoven enchanted and educated. Now having struggled learning how to practice analysis for over six decades, I find that Jones has opened new paths to understanding transience and transferences. As Yeats said, “Our souls are love, and a continual farewell.” This remarkable work will excite and enrich your mind, as it did mine.'
Warren S. Poland, author of Intimacy and Separateness in Psychoanalysis
'It is not common to call a psychoanalytic book beautiful but in this extraordinary and luminous volume Alice Jones invites us to engage with our patients as we might engage with a poem. In fact she deftly teaches us how to experience a poem, how to hear not simply the words themselves but the infinite in the spaces between and behind the words. Her resonant writing along with the transformative and sometimes magical poems she has gathered here create the very experience she is describing: we are profoundly changed and our capacity to listen, comprehend and experience the music, rhythms and cadences of our patients and of our own inner selves is expanded and deepened. She takes us beyond hermeneutics, beyond the simple meaning-making function of language into the truly sensory and transcendent qualities of poetry and clinical work, to that place where “the wild does not have words”. I have no doubt that after reading this book you will never listen to your patients in quite the same way.'
Robert Grossmark, author of The Unobtrusive Relational Analyst: Explorations in Psychoanalytic Companioning
