Analysis and Creativity

Wendy Cope

WENDY COPE is one of Britain's leading poets. Her books Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis and Serious Concerns (Faber and Faber, 1986 and 1992) are both best sellers, and she has won several awards. She began writing poetry three months after the start of her analysis. A brief, moving - and amusing - account of her analysis will soon be published in Mind Readings (Secker, 1996). The following is an excerpt from a conversation with the Editor about the contention that an analysis is bad for an artist's creativity.

When I went into analysis there weren't any questions about whether it would be bad for me as a writer because I wasn't a writer. I was completely inhibited, paralysed really. I wanted to be a writer when I was a little girl but I'd forgotten about it. What happened was that quite quickly, within a few months, I began writing. I was getting in touch with some powerful feelings and I didn't know quite what to do with them. One afternoon I felt like writing a poem. I'll tell you what the important thing was - it was to do with my feeling that I had a right to my own way of seeing things. Up until then I had allowed other people to impose their view of things to such an extent that I didn't very often see things for myself.

The first breakthrough was to understand that I was entitled to my view of what was going on between me and the man I was involved with. I didn't have to accept his view and I didn't have to argue with him either. I was entitled to have my own view privately, which was not the same as his. I found that I wanted to write it down and that was, I think, the first poem I wrote.

Incidentally, there's a point I want to make because I know that feminists worry about psychoanalysis, and I have certainly had some concerns myself. One thing analysis has done is make it a lot more difficult for men to exploit me and I would imagine that's true for quite a few women. So whatever your worries are about your analyst's theories about women, if in practice it has become a lot more difficult for men to exploit you, then that is a gain.

Being able to see things for myself, feeling I was entitled to my way of seeing things, was also very much bound up with getting in touch with my feelings, with my emotions. I imagine that very often in the early stage of analysis the patient says: 'no, I'm not angry - that would be unreasonable'. At a certain point I realised, and this was a revelation to me, that when someone asked me how I felt about something, I was coming up with a plausible answer but actually I didn't really know how I was feeling. I asked myself what would be reasonable. I thought I was telling the truth but then I realised that's not how I'm feeling, that's just what I think. I began to see that I did not actually know where to look for the answer to the question, 'what are you feeling?'

I didn't know that if you accidentally drop a cup of tea over someone it may mean that you're angry with them. Once you understand that, you notice what you're doing, and you notice what thoughts cross your mind. And those are clues and then you get better at it. I think I'm pretty well in touch with my feelings most of the time now. I don't usually have to wait till I drop something to find out that I'm angry.

I want to tell you about an afternoon when I sat in Battersea Park, looking at a tree. It was if this was the first time I'd been able to see a tree. How I felt about that tree, I realised, was mine and nobody could argue me out of it. It was an important moment, very moving. I sat there crying, and later that day I wrote a poem about that tree.

Truth to feeling is the important thing and that is why I don't see how analysis could make anyone a worse poet. Poetry is about telling the truth. The poet and the psychoanalyst are both seekers after truth.

Another parallel between analysis and writing poetry is that you have to be prepared for surprises. I think it was Robert Frost who said that there's no point in starting a poem if you know how it's going to end. It's a commonplace among poets that a poem takes on a life of its own. You have to be prepared for things to come up and for the poem to go off in a completely different direction from the direction you're expecting. And it's the same in analysis - you learn to expect surprises. You don't know what's going to come up and there's the same kind of excitement.

Some people are afraid that analysis or psychotherapy will make them more ordinary and boring. There's a problem about the word 'normal'. Some analysts, I think, use the word to mean perfect mental health. But to a lot of people 'normal' means ordinary and boring. They don't want to be 'normal', they want to be special. In fact, of course, if analysis helps someone to be more herself it'll make her more special.

The Journey

The journey was difficult at first

Until I shipped my oars,

Let the river sweep me on,

Lifted my eyes from the dark brown water

And the search for rocks,

Saw the land, the sky, glide past.

My boat will complete the journey.

I do not know where the winding river leads.

I do not ask who will arrive.

I do not look downwards

As I reach the waterfall -

Midstream and faithful to the current.

There is no wind -

Only the power of the water.

Wendy Cope wrote this poem during the first year of her analysis.