| Abstract: | The poetry of Wallace Stevens offers lessons for psychoanalysts--especially in regard to the postmodern concern that there is no single true way of telling the human tale. Stevens was preoccupied with the impossibility of grasping reality through language. Nevertheless he made beautiful, true poems. Psychoanalytic concepts too may be only language, "merely" metaphors. But in collaborative metaphor making there is the possibility of finding provisional truth, that is, other, better ways of telling our experience and playing out our life stories. We can continue to rely on an interpretative process that organizes experience without expecting or needing to pin it down in any final sense. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
