ABSTRACT
This chapter compares our engagement with difficult-to-understand poems with our engagement with patients whose inner life resists our empathic inquiry. Emily Dickinson’s poem “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” is examined, in which states of suffering and consolation seem to alternate. Like the implicit communication of a patient, these states are communicated by sound and rhythm as much as content. The elusiveness of Paul Celan’s poetry has everything to do with the suffering he endured as a Holocaust survivor. This suffering remains just outside the margins of his poems. A case example is offered in which the patient’s childhood trauma remains largely outside therapeutic discourse.
