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A Therapeutic Approach to Teaching PoetryGaining Awareness and Overcoming Defenses

A Therapeutic Approach to Teaching Poetry: Gaining Awareness and Overcoming Defenses [Poetic language provides a powerful tool for opening the self to new possibilities. Lacanian psychoanalysis offers us an understanding of how this renewal can occur through language. “In poetry, as in psychoanalysis,” Bice Benvenuto and Roger Kennedy explain in their book on Lacan, “language is pushed to its limits, and becomes a struggle with the inexpressible” (199). Poetry functions much like the speech of the analytic process, in which speech is loosened so that desire may make itself manifest. Desire manifested in language subverts the rigid, imaginary ego with all of its defenses that limit truth and subjectivity. Through poetry, we can escape the code of normal speech and discover a new definition of being for ourselves. “There is poetry,” according to Lacan, “whenever writing introduces us to a world other than our own and also makes it become our own” (Seminar III 78). In essence, poetry imposes upon us the otherness of language—what Lacan calls the symbolic order—but also allows us to find our unique place within that otherness. The systems of language that our culture uses predate our birth, but also provide us with the potential to explore, realize, and create our identities and our world. Lacan places poetry in the dual roles of both the analyst—introducing the true nature of our subjectivity by effecting desire—and the fully realized analysand—realizing our own capacity for creative subjectivity.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

A Therapeutic Approach to Teaching PoetryGaining Awareness and Overcoming Defenses

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Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan US
Copyright
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Nature America Inc. 2012
ISBN
978-1-349-34298-3
Pages
1 –15
DOI
10.1057/9781137102034_1
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[Poetic language provides a powerful tool for opening the self to new possibilities. Lacanian psychoanalysis offers us an understanding of how this renewal can occur through language. “In poetry, as in psychoanalysis,” Bice Benvenuto and Roger Kennedy explain in their book on Lacan, “language is pushed to its limits, and becomes a struggle with the inexpressible” (199). Poetry functions much like the speech of the analytic process, in which speech is loosened so that desire may make itself manifest. Desire manifested in language subverts the rigid, imaginary ego with all of its defenses that limit truth and subjectivity. Through poetry, we can escape the code of normal speech and discover a new definition of being for ourselves. “There is poetry,” according to Lacan, “whenever writing introduces us to a world other than our own and also makes it become our own” (Seminar III 78). In essence, poetry imposes upon us the otherness of language—what Lacan calls the symbolic order—but also allows us to find our unique place within that otherness. The systems of language that our culture uses predate our birth, but also provide us with the potential to explore, realize, and create our identities and our world. Lacan places poetry in the dual roles of both the analyst—introducing the true nature of our subjectivity by effecting desire—and the fully realized analysand—realizing our own capacity for creative subjectivity.]

Published: Nov 2, 2015

Keywords: External Reality; Mature Defense; Symbolic Order; Creative Writing; Poetic Language

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