Psychoanalysis is a work of imaginative tellings in the realm of poiesis, which means simply “making,” and which I take to mean making by imagination into words. Our work more particularly belongs to the rhetoric of poiesis, by which I mean the persuasive power of imagining in words, an artfulness in speaking and hearing, writing and reading
ego psychology – as presented first by Freud, then by … the therapeutic establishment … we produced ego psychology through our way of writing cases … our case histories not so much empirical demonstrations of the way the psyche works but empirical demonstrations of the way that poiesis works in organizing our vision … we would open ourselves to the idea that were the story written in another way, by another hand, from another perspective, it would sound different and therefore be a different story … suggesting the poetic basis of therapy, of biography, of our very lives