Between Hours: A Collection of Poems by Psychoanalysts

by Salman Akhtar (Editor)

While accommodating playfulness and even a bit of audacity, both psychoanalysis and poetry deeply respect formality of structure, nuance of affect, and the multifaceted resonance of the spoken word. Twinship of the analytic and poetic discourse is also evident in the parallels between a fumbling pause in free associations and an aching line break in a poem, a telling parapraxis and an inspired metaphor, an acknowledgment of the repressed via its negation and the irony of simultaneous hiding and revealing in verse, and so on. To put it bluntly, psychoanalysis is two-person poetry and poetry one-person psychoanalysis. Nowhere is this juxtaposition more apparent than in this book of poems by psychoanalysts. The first ever collection of its sort.

Genres: Poetry

120 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Salman Akhtar is an Indian-American psychoanalyst practicing in the United States. He is an author and Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia.