Naomi Ruth Lowinsky

The Language of Soul: Psychotherapy as a Poetic Form

					my heart woke
					to a range and measure
					of song
					I hadn't known
							-- H.D.

Poetry is Psyche's first language, taking us back to the beginnings of human culture. Psychotherapy can be seen as a recent form of an ancient practice: a sacred space for words; a place to say the unsayable, to name the unnameable, to talk to ghosts and to the gods. It was Jung's premise that the realm of the imagination - the place where conscious and unconscious meet - is where psychological transformation begins. In a deep psychotherapy the soul is released from whatever has confined her, to speak in her own native tongue. The poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) gives us an intimate glimpse into this process in her memoir about her analysis with Sigmund Freud.

Writing from the Depths

					Remember us the language
					from the bottom of it all
						low
						in
						sky

We will devote this day to seeking our own deep language, our native tongue: words that held mana in childhood; words that remember those awful and awesome experiences that shape our lives. Using active imagination and writing exercises, we will seek our personal language of the soul.

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky is a published poet, an analyst member of the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, author of The Motherline: Every Woman's Journey to Find Her Female Roots, and poetry and fiction editor of Psychological Perspectives. She speaks and publishes widely on the feminine and the creative. Her essay on H.D., "Our Lady of the Pomogranate," appeared in the Fall 1997 issue of the San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal.

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