ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the common ground between poetry and psychotherapy. It also looks at the Kleinian concept of reparation from an attachment perspective. Poetry and psychotherapy are strange, yet compatible, bedfellows. In both a psychotherapeutic session and a poem there is a dialectic between expectable form and the infinite possibilities of new or 'emergent meanings'. Wordsworth famously defined poetry as 'emotion recollected in tranquillity'. Both lyric poetry and psychoanalytic work have the capacity to focus on tiny fragments of experience, replay them, tracing their emotional links backwards in time and 'sideways' with other sets of experiences and emotions. According to Eagleton poetry is always at some level language which is about itself. Aggression and reparation are indissolubly linked. By contrast, attachment sees mentalising as a built-in repair-mechanism helping us to survive the inevitable and 'objective' as opposed to the 'subjectivity' of hatred and aggression as separations and losses that are the reverse side of the attachment coin.
