The Muse as Therapist: A New Poetic Paradigm for Psychotherapy

This book explores and develops a powerful and crucial analogy between psychotherapy and poetry which constitutes a new model or paradigm for psychotherapy. Put in a brief sentence it says: Therapy is a form of poesis, and poesis in turn is therapeutic, or pertains to therapy.

Nested within the general framework and analogy, the book, secondly, develops a powerful three-aspect model of both poetry and psychotherapy which synoptically overviews the whole range of the psychotherapies, and enables us to evoke the several simultaneous aspects which are continuously involved in our work. In doing so it gives the most elusive, but also most fundamental, aspects of psychotherapy a name, and a fully developed conceptual-philosophical foundation--perhaps for the first time--while relating them to and integrating them with, more familiar aspects.