Is Poetry Just Therapy? Unpacking a Contentious Idea
Today, we're diving deep into an often-debated topic: Is poetry just therapy? While the healing power of poetry is undeniable, reducing it solely to a therapeutic tool might limit our understanding of its true potential as an art form.
This blog post is a companion to my recent YouTube video, where I unpack this very question in more depth. You can watch the full video by clicking on the image of Plato and Jung above.
In this post, we'll explore what some profound thinkers – from Plato and Carl Jung to Owen Barfield, Kathleen Raine, and Muriel Rukeyser – have to say about this highly contentious issue of poetry healing and its role in our lives.
Let's consider some key questions together as we explore this idea:
Can poetry be truly therapeutic, or does that limit our understanding of its power?
If we only see poetry as therapy, what does that imply about the quality and ambition of the art?
What happens if our sole focus is on poetry's healing potential, potentially overlooking its other vital roles?
I'd love to hear your initial thoughts in the comments on YouTube!
My Threefold Take on Poetry and Healing
Here are my initial thoughts on this complex relationship between poetry and healing:
Poetry can be therapeutic, but it doesn’t have to be. And crucially, therapy doesn't need to be the primary focus of poetry.
If poetry is only therapeutic, what does that say about the standards of the art? Are we aiming for excellence if our sole purpose for writing poetry is to feel better? Should we only be writing poems designed to heal others?
If poetry is therapeutic, what happens if we only see poetry in terms of how it might heal us?
The Ancient Skeptic: Plato's Warning Against Art
To kick things off, let's consider an immediate counterargument: could poetry, as the ancient Greek philosopher Plato believed, actually be harmful? This is where our discussion of poetry as therapy begins.
Plato's famous Theory of Forms provides a fascinating lens here. Imagine a vibrant, sunset-red rose from your garden. In Plato's World of Forms, that rose has a perfect, archetypal counterpart – let's call it "Flowerness." Now, gather a bouquet of roses and even a lily. To Plato, each individual flower in that bouquet is a copy, or a distortion, of that perfect Flowerness existing in the World of Forms. The "Idea" of Flowerness is the "true" and "beautiful" form.
Now, consider a painter depicting a flower. Plato would see this painted flower as a copy of a copy – even further removed from the true Form of Flowerness, and thus, an even greater distortion of Truth. Similarly, he believed poets could only, at best, create copies of a copy, their explorations far removed from the True Forms. He saw poetry as deceptive and potentially harmful, not healing or uplifting. He even noted that those who listened to bards felt a kind of madness or enchantment.
While I have some sympathy for Plato's perspective on Forms, and with all due respect to the great philosopher, poetry isn't quite the same as it was in his day. Its healing effects needn't be considered distortions of truth. In fact, it is truth – even just an emotional truth – that can cause real and lasting change in us. Think about how a poem can shock, connect, or help us make sense of an experience when we first encounter it. This is where meaning in poetry often sparks transformation.
If an encounter with a poem brings about positive change, I think it's fair to call it therapeutic. One thing is undeniable: Plato's critique profoundly changed how we view poetry.
Jung's Expansive View: Beyond Psychological Reduction
In stark contrast to Plato's concerns about art leading us away from truth, thinkers like Carl Jung, much later, saw immense value in the human psyche's expression through imaginative endeavors like making art. Jung cautioned against reducing art purely to psychology – for example, claiming "every artist is a narcissist" or that all art is simply a reflection of an artist's relationship with their parents. He found such claims unhelpful and overly reductive. This is a key point in understanding Carl Jungs’s philosophy of art more generally.
To draw a parallel with some Platonic thinking, to reduce a poem to the mere psychologizing of the poet would strip it of its larger, unifying, living existence. This would devalue the art, even if we highly regard its potential healing powers.
What Does "Therapeutic" Even Mean?
Let's look at the definition. The word "therapeutic" comes from the Greek "therapeutikos," meaning "to cure, treat medically," or "do service, take care of, provide for."
The question arises: Can poetry cure us or treat us medically?
In some ways, perhaps yes; in others, perhaps not. Poetry can help us make sense of an emotion or experience, create meaning from it, and integrate it better, potentially leading to healthier psychological functioning. There's plenty of evidence of poetry therapy helping people feel better. But is this all the art should be doing? Jogging can be therapeutic, too, but do we only go for jogs as a form of therapy?
The debate about whether poetry is therapeutic has been ongoing for a long time, with a wide range of opinions from poets, therapists, and others.
Personally, I've written poems that I found healing as they helped me understand something I hadn't grasped before I wrote them. They helped me confront something I wasn't fully aware of, stumbling upon a personal truth that sparked change and encouraged me to act on that change.
However, I also remember my first year at university when I was severely depressed. Alongside struggling socially, drinking heavily, staying up until 4 AM, and skipping classes, I was writing poetry. Looking back, these poems often made me wallow in those feelings and seek attention for what was, frankly, mediocre work. They reinforced my ego's identification with depression rather than lifting me out of it. In short, it wasn't all that therapeutic; in fact, it had the opposite effect. Plato, my friend, this one's for you.
Kathleen Raine's Skepticism: The Danger of Ego
In Kathleen Raine's essay, “What is the Use of Poetry?”, she recounts a story of a young American who sent her poems along with a letter stating his psychiatrist advised him to publish them because it would be “good for him.” Raine was unimpressed with the poems' quality and taken aback by the therapist's advice. While she believed poetry could have a healing effect, she pondered: "What good could have come from feeding an illusion?" She thought the student would be better advised to keep writing, or, better yet, read and internalize some of the great poems as part of his poetic education and emotional growth. This touches on the benefits of reading poetry for personal development.
Raine questioned the healing effects of publishing weaker poems on the patient's ego, wondering how harmful it might be if it inflated his ego and detracted him from his inner work. Later in that same essay, Raine asks: "Unless a work of art comes from a higher, a deeper, source than the trivial daily mind, how can it enlarge, expand, or heal that mind?"
Despite her affinity for Jung, they might have a point of disagreement here. Jung believed people would do anything, "no matter how absurd," not to face their own souls, afraid of expressing themselves in the first place. He wrote in Memories, Dreams, Reflections that people should find their own myth, not follow someone else's. However, Raine believed that being learned in myth, poetry, and art – things of the imagination – would help educate the budding artist to express themselves rather than hinder them. Perhaps, then, the greater the power and force of the expression, the greater potential for healing benefits poetry writing has.
If we accept Raine’s thoughts, how can poetry stemming from a "trivial mind" truly be nourishing? How can it be therapeutic if it lacks the powerful qualities found in the best art? Should we be thinking about art as therapy at all?
Art vs. Therapy: A Necessary Distinction
Moving forward, contemporary poets like Kim Addonizio offer a slightly different perspective, acknowledging the therapeutic aspect while maintaining a crucial distinction between art and therapy. In Ordinary Genius, she writes that we should not see art and therapy as the same thing, as there is a "real distinction" between the two. However, she argues that "the truth is that art is therapeutic. It helps you take something that is within you and make a place for it outside yourself." Again, I would argue that art can be therapeutic, rather than making a blanket statement that it "is." There's no need for it to be (or not to be) one or the other.
One of my fears about reducing poetry to only its therapeutic nature is that it implies a singular “purpose.” Is that purpose simply to help us navigate our day-to-day lives, to be functioning members of a capitalist society that champions the idea of working hard for material gain (even though we know that's not always directly correlated)?
Let's put it this way: a child diagnosed with ADHD might be prescribed Ritalin because they're deemed “disruptive” in school. But the very nature of this school asks the child to sit still for hours, listen, and take tests. The school's nature isn't conducive to the child's thriving. If our society isn't conducive to our thriving, would poetry as therapy perhaps just make us “good little drone citizens,” feeling better so we can fit in and be “productive” in our jobs?
If poetry is therapeutic, is it meant to function like Ritalin for the child? Is it meant to make us, the “square pegs,” cram into the “round hole” of a standardized culture? Should poetry be making us fit in or encouraging us to stand out, individualize, discover our core selves, and see the world as individuals?
Meaning-Making and the Poetic Element
A better way to think of poems is that they are made up of units of meaning that comprise their whole meaning. Post-modern poets, known for their focus on fragmentation and questioning traditional structures, might disagree, using poetry to “de-construct.” But I would argue that if there's something to deconstruct, there's meaning in the deconstruction, and we need to know what comes after – a meaningful reconstruction.
Therefore, it's probably fair to say that the poet should focus more on capturing meaning and connectivity in their poem, and how each poem's unique qualities of sound, rhythm, image, music, symbol, and more comprise the poem, rather than concentrating on its therapeutic effects. This may take a different form in a therapist's office. However, therapeutic effects, if they are to be experienced, will likely happen naturally during the writing of certain poems. Why? Because through meaning, and finding the most beautiful way to put language together, any therapeutic effects that need to emerge will likely do so on their own. If the poet makes the connection between the meanings of the poem and their own life, it's then up to them to actualize those changes.
However, trauma therapist Dr. Ericha Scott has taught me that a mixture of art, poetry, and other creative therapy modalities has helped many people overcome alcoholism, trauma, and a host of other mental disturbances. Again, without needing to reduce art, it's undoubtedly true that it can and does have therapeutic benefits. This is a crucial aspect of poetry's healing benefits.
Furthermore, in my conversations with National Bestselling author of How Words Change Your Brain, and expert neuroscience researcher, Mark Waldman, I’ve learned that speaking poetically — by slowing down, finding metaphors, and adding a rhythmic element to your speech — can deepen your relationships with others and help you heal. Although speaking poetically for meaning is not a "new" insight, much neuroscience research has confirmed this to be true.
Barfield's “Poetic Element” and the Power of Imagination
Consider Owen Barfield, who published his marvelous book, Poetic Diction in 1928. Barfield argues that there is a “poetic element” present in “all meaningful language.” If we accept this, what does that say about poetry that is not expressly therapeutic? If our meaningful language is poetic, what does that say about our day-to-day conversations? Could we get out of the “trivial mind” Raine discussed and into that higher mind to write better poems that could be therapeutic, as they help us make sense of our most complicated experiences? This relates directly to the power of poetry in daily life.
Under the clear influence of Coleridge, Barfield goes on to write that “Only by imagination... can the world be known.” This is profoundly true. Even though we receive and interpret our sensory impressions, creating any meaning at all out of them requires our imaginations to wed these things together. Imagination is at the cornerstone of many things, from future planning to empathy to problem-solving to artistic expression.
I'm immediately brought back to Jung here, as he believed that the psyche was a self-correcting organism. Like the body, the psyche attempts to balance itself for optimal functioning, similar to biological homeostasis. Jung believed dreams were the psyche's way of achieving this, especially when dreams were reconstructed and discussed in the therapist's office, as was psychotherapy more generally, making art, and paying attention to synchronicities (when an outer event and an inner circumstance converge like two rivers on their way to the ocean).
Barfield argues that poetry performs three functions:
“Pleasurable entertainment,” which he warns “must never be forgotten.”
“The making of meaning,” which gives life to language and makes true knowledge possible through the “vehicle of the imagination.”
Art should be a mirror — not necessarily an approval — of “the characteristic response of the age which it is written.”
With Barfield, Jung, and Raine in mind, poetry is better thought of as an art of making meaning, with potential therapeutic benefits. Poetry can be nourishing, beautiful, soulful, completing, funny, dark, and create change.
Rukeyser's Invitation: A Total Response to Poetry
Muriel Rukeyser sees poetry a little differently from these thinkers. She says that poetry is an invitation. “What does it invite?” she asks. “A poem invites you to feel. More than that: it invites you to respond. And better than that: a poem invites a total response.”
A total response means engaging with the full force of consciousness: body, heart, intellect, intuition, sensory engagement, and anything else you can bring to the art with your utmost attention. Poetry can be historical or prophetic. It can be healing, used as resistance, beautiful, elevating, destructive, terrifying, rewarding, truthful, strange, or dangerous.
Poetry allows us to plumb the depths of the human experience, helps us understand and interpret our world, and affects our relationship to it: individually, socially, culturally, phenomenologically, spiritually, and more. It also helps us find language to express the various complexities of life.
To see poetry as just therapy would strip away some of the mysterious quality of the art, and its ability to reflect and change human consciousness and the age in which it is written. Human consciousness and the human condition are too rich and complex to reduce to therapy. As poetry pulls together the fragments of human experience – which we are deluded into thinking is unitary – it allows us to create a form that seems solid, but that pulses and moves and lives as different humans in different places and times interact with it.
Unlike Plato's passive reception of a distorted copy, engagement with poetry, whether through writing or reading, is an active process of meaning-making and feeling. This active participation, this “total response,” as Rukeyser suggests, moves beyond the static imitation Plato feared, creating a dynamic space where healing or other effects can emerge organically, tied not to a perfect Form but to the messy, vital reality of being human.
My Concluding Thoughts on Poetry's Role
To summarize my thoughts from this video and post:
Poetry has a therapeutic effect.
Poetry is an art – it communicates, has cultural value, and standards of quality.
If one approaches poetry only for the therapeutic effect, it may backfire, producing weak poetry and/or further psychic distress.
However, improving as a poet – engaging deeply in expression and communication – may increase the therapeutic effect of writing, even if writing only for oneself.
What do you think? Do you find reading or writing poetry therapeutic? Can you recall a time when a poem was particularly therapeutic to you or another? Let us know in the comments below!
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