The Psychodynamic Poets & The Relational Journey To Self-Discovery

Nourished and inspired by the understanding gained by thinkers who have gone before them, the psychodynamic poets invite their interlocutors to join in an intersubjective quest. Self-discovery is not an adventure done in isolation, it is a relational journey.

I write in my notebook with the intention of stimulating good conversation, hoping that it will also be of use to some fellow traveler. But perhaps my notes are mere drunken chatter, the incoherent babbling of a dreamer. If so, read them as such. — Matsuo Bashō, wandering poet, The Knapsack Notebook, 17th century

On the ridge between familiarity and novelty, the psychodynamic poets are making the strange familiar and the familiar strange, as goes the saying attributed to the 18th century romantic poet and philosophical thinker Novalis, later adopted by cultural anthropologists as an approach to fieldwork. Too much familiarity would be boring, too much novelty would lead to confusion (Menninghaus et al., 2019).

To address with precision the presence of immediate experience, the psychodynamic poets always say more than…