How Psychoanalysis Shaped my Poetry with Nancy Kuhl

This week, Aneta and Isaac speak with poet Nancy Kuhl as she discusses the relationship between her practices in language and her work with psychoanalysis. Kuhl details how the tangle of metaphor in poetry can supply rich ground for examining the conscious and unconscious at work in our minds. In her latest book, On Hysteria, Kuhl responds to Freud's 1858 Studies on Hysteria and contends with the space where thought becomes physical.

"My view of creativity was shifted completely [by psychoanalysis]. I came to think so differently about making meaning than I had before. And it’s not as if I hadn’t thought about language and metaphor and making meaning. I thought I had already given that a lot of consideration. But the [psychoanalytic] perspective is different enough and includes enough of the same kinds of interests [like] idiom, specificity of expression and speech, and voice … [these things] came alive in new ways." — Nancy Kuhl

Read Nancy Kuhl's Poem, "The Talking Cure" in ROOM 6.22.