poiesis of psychoanalysis

• 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