Poetry as Therapy

Adam Phillips in the Economist is interviewed about poetry and psychotherapy.

From the piece...

What do you see as the relationship between psychoanalysis and poetry?

The most obvious link is that they are both linguistic arts. Freud suggests not exactly that we speak in poetry, because poetry has line-endings, but that we potentially speak with the type of incisiveness and ambiguity that we’re most used to finding in poetry. So, to put it slightly differently: the reading of poetry would be a very good training for a psychoanalyst.