ABSTRACT
Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet, was born and bred in the same corner of the earth as I, and his description of how he creates his art captures for me the essence of the psychoanalytic enterprise: “The early-in-life experience has been central to me all right. But I'd say you aren't so much trying to describe it as trying to locate it. The amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain's and the body's systems is inestimable. It's like a culture at the bottom of a jar, although it doesn't grow … Or help anything else to grow unless you find a way to reach it and touch it. But once you do, it's like putting your hand into a nest and finding something beginning to hatch out in your head” (interview with Dennis O'Driscoll, 2008: p. 58).
