"All the light we cannot see": Psychoanalytic and poetic reflections on the nature of hope

Poetry captures that which lies beyond words. It expresses the rhythms and silences of music reaching areas of experience that exist outside the restrictions of simple prose. In terms of the treatment of poetry in the pages of the IJP and the IRP since their inception, we encounter a commanding story of the history of psychoanalysis itself. In the life of these two journals, we trace a massive shift from "victimisation of literature by psychoanalytic interpreters", as Wilfred Bion described it, to genuine enlightenment. That is, the pages of the journals confirm the rather bleak oversimplifications of many of the early articles, by contrast to the more contemporary psychoanalytic insights into the nature of creativity and the centrality of meaning in psychic and artistic life. The move is towards the aesthetic: towards the relationship between form and content and towards the poetic becoming a vital dimension of understanding the unconscious itself.