The Ambulatorium

I had never written poetry until something clicked as I walked from my analyst’s office. Since I was 18 years old, I wrote, but was never brave enough to try poetry.  I made some notes that day and kept playing with the words. This felt like getting hit in the head with a can of peaches only to wake up and feel like I can play the piano. 

In the best moments, psychoanalysis can be described much like the poet Charles Simic defined a poem as “… an attempt at self-recovery, self-recognition, self-remembering, the marvel of being again… A poem is a piece of the unutterable whole.”

Psychoanalysis is weird and can be terrifying, but a fifty-minute session that surprises both the therapist and patient becomes a poem in this way and the arc of a therapeutic relationship becomes a glimpse of that unutterable whole of one’s self. Like analysis, writing poetry is this effort, for me, of trying to be as precise as possible while trying to figure out what it is I’m trying to say.