Contemporary
psychoanalysis has sought to deconstruct the authority of the analyst as ‘the
one who knows’ and, instead, struggles to open itself to uncertainty,
spontaneity, and surprise in the analytic situation. In struggling to become
more open to uncertainty, I was pleased to see on PBS Newshour an interview by
Jeffrey Brown on March 4, 2013 of poet and renowned translator David Ferry. Now 88 years of age, David
Ferry was given the Ruth Lilly Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011 and recently won
the 2012 National Book Award for Poetry for his most recent collection of
poems, titled Bewilderment. When asked by what he was bewildered, Ferry answered,
Everything…just as everything we say to one another is an
attempt to try to get something clear to the other person or to ourselves and....
that's always a partial success and a partial failure. … [T]he title
[Bewilderment] acknowledges that.
I thought how like the
attempt between analyst and analysand that is, or between any two people
really, in any relationship, striving to approximate ever closer, and accepting
that inevitably it fails, as it must fail, for we retain our otherness.
Jeffrey Brown noted, “ This
is a man clearly obsessed with connections and links,” when referring to how
Ferry integrates with his original poetry lines from famous classical works [Ferry is an acclaimed translator of the Babylonian
epic "Gilgamesh" and of Latin texts by Horace and Virgil, and is
presently working on an English version of Virgil's epic, "The Aeneid"]. Ferry explains. “One reason for doing that is what it
says in my own poem [See below], its usefulness for that poem. It also, I think, does mean
that there's a kind of motive to connect what you're saying to the past of
writing, that you want your own poem to be part of that kind of enterprise.”
Talk about the intersubjectivity of poetry:
Ferry is influenced by Virgil and then he changes Virgil when he includes the classic
work in his modern poems. Ferry says it
like this: “When you read something, and
especially when you're reading compellingly great [poetry], that becomes part of your identity, at least
while you're reading it. You become changed by reading it.” Though Ferry adds, “And
then you're finished with it. Then you're lost again. Then you're back to just
who you are.” I know that a number of analytic patients feel that way between
sessions as if the change within us is too imperceptible to be held. I think who we are now includes how the poem had changed
us then. Our impact on our patients, and theirs on us, remains, however
imperceptible. [You can never stand in the
same river twice.]
I will close with an
excerpt from Ferry’s "Ancestral Lines" which talks about our connection
to the past:
It’s as when following
the others’ lines,
Which are the tracks of
somebody gone before,
Leaving me mischievous
clues, telling me who
They were and who it was
they weren’t,
And who it is I am
because of them,
Or, just for the moment,
reading them, I am,
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