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(2005). Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 74:443-463

Clinical Conversations between Psychoanalysis and Imaginative Literature

Fred L. Griffin, M.D.

A literary form created by an imaginative writer captures something of the way the author shapes emotional experience and psychologically engages with it. The manner in which experience is created and contained in an imaginative literary text has much in common with the way experience is generated and worked with in the psychoanalytic situation.

The author describes a clinical experience in which there was a collapse of the analytic (imaginative) space. He then discusses how he made use of a “conversation” he created with a short story and his own analytic experience to restore his imaginative capacities and to resume psychological work with the patient.

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