Adrienne Rich’s “Transcendental Etude”: The Poetics of Self-Transformation

When there is territory to be explored for which there is no map, many psychoanalysts, including Bion (1981, 2014), Loewald (2000), Milner (1950, 1987), Ogden (1997), Winnicott (2008), and Freud (2010) himself, refer/defer to the poets or to poetry of their own creation. In this article, Adrienne Rich’s foundational poem, “Transcendental Etude” (1977), is used as the point of departure to explore the territory of self-transformation. The article demonstrates how the trajectory of Rich’s evocative—and provocative—poem parallels in almost uncanny ways our earliest experiences of “being-in-the-world” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 78), as well as the therapeutic action and ultimate (we hope) transformation of the self that accompanies a “good enough” analysis. The article also suggests that clinicians incorporate an aesthetic sensibility into our work with patients to allow us to reach more deeply into the within and the between of the unspoken—sometimes unspeakable—experiences of our patients and ourselves. Clinical vignettes of the author’s work with a young man illuminate this process of self-transformation through the discovery of the patient’s personal lyric—a lyric found by him in poetry, song, and foreign film.