Many people have noticed that one of the costs of being ‘always online’ seems to be a deterioration in attentional capacity.  In this paper I will consider the importance of the psychic function of attention from a psychoanalytic perspective, and will discuss whether and in what ways the experience of reading poetry might be restorative.  With reference to W. B. Yeats’ 1920 poem ‘The Second Coming’, I will explore the particular qualities of the attentional state required to read poetry and how this links with evenly suspended attention, free association and Bion’s ideas about listening without memory or desire, referring also to Keats’ concept of negative capability and Coleridge’s proposal that poetic faith is constituted by a willing suspension of disbelief.

Elizabeth Allison DPhil is the Director of the Psychoanalysis Unit in the Research Department of Clinical, Educational & Health Psychology at UCL. She is an Associate Professor and Programme Director of UCL’s MSc in Theoretical Psychoanalytic Studies. She is a psychoanalyst and Member of the British Psychoanalytical Society. She is the Editor of the Psychoanalytic Controversies section of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. She holds a doctorate in English Literature from the University of Oxford.

Series Summary

‘"I must find new words": Dialogues on Poetry and Psychoanalysis’ 

So moved by her experience of being psychoanalysed by Freud, the modernist poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) declared, “I must find new words as the Professor found or coined new words to explain certain as yet unrecorded states of mind or being.” This Summer Series, through lectures and discussions with poets, scholars and analysts, considers various encounters between the cultures of poetry and psychoanalysis, their rich historical dialogues, methods of finding and new coinages. 

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