ABSTRACT
The American poet William Carlos Williams’s famous dictum “no ideas but in things” highlights his preference for immediate perception over abstraction. This makes him a natural ally for analysts who, like Heinz Kohut, advocate an experience-near approach to psychoanalysis. One example of Williams’s close attention to detail is his use of American speech idioms. Another is his close attention to the physicality of perception, to its moment-to-moment shifts. Close perception of the world ultimately leads to an opening of the heart, as shown in Williams’s late love poetry. In his long poem Paterson, the poet opens his sense of self to include the whole of a city, its people and its history. A case vignette concludes the chapter in which two vivid perceptions of childhood become a conduit for a couple’s mutual understanding.
