Introduction

The title for this book, Acquainted with the Night is taken from a Robert Frost poem. We have chosen it because it captures something of the overlapping areas of interest shared by poets and psychoanalytic psychotherapists. It hints at the hidden recesses of the mind: imaginative possibilities; a familiarity with the more shadowy aspects of personality and life; the adult intimacy of the bedroom and the childhood feelings of exclusion from it; awareness of death but also the excitement and intensity of experience and feeling that the night can bring. Both poetry and psychoanalysis seek to help poet and reader or therapist and patient become more closely acquainted with these aspects of experience and mental life.