05/03/2023
Allow me to introduce you to Lyrical Work, as an aspect of psychotherapy. I understand it by analogy to dreamwork, which is the therapeutic practice of narrating and interpreting dreams to help clients develop personal insight and self-knowledge. Similarly, lyrical work refers to a practice of eliciting and illuminating the lyrical forms of speech that build clients’ sense of personal presence. Both affirm the presence of unique persons, who dream only what they can dream, and speak only what they can speak. This personal presence is a central focus of psychotherapy: How clients can be present to themselves and present to others as sources and recipients of love and understanding.
So how is it that we can come to feel, instead, like helpless sources and recipients of pain and scorn? I would argue that most of us suffer from a breakdown of personal presence, which manifests as lack of confidence, poor self-image/self-esteem, vulnerability and anxiousness, difficulty setting boundaries, overwhelm and dissociation, discouragement or despair, loneliness and isolation. Trauma is typically implicated in the breakdown of personal presence.
According to the poet Allen Grossman, lyrical poetry “has the function of making persons present to one another in that special sense in which they are acknowledgeable and therefore capable of love and mutual interest in one another’s safety.” Grossman’s poetics has taught me a lot about psychotherapy and how to be present for my clients in order to elicit their presence in turn. I chose the term “lyrical work” to refer to the therapeutic process of building personal presence through speech.
I believe lyrical work is a part of all successful therapy—perhaps most clearly in those moments when a client says something incredibly personal, and only then begins to think and remember—even if most therapists or theories of psychotherapy don’t account for it this way. Lyrical work does not require the writing and reading of poems, but those practices as parts of therapy (popularly known as poetry therapy) can certainly support lyrical work.
I’d like to make it clear that in my usage “lyrical” does not mean eloquent or charming but describes the kind of voice that breaks from oppressive conventions and makes known the presence of a unique person. We need this lyrical voice to speak from our pain, to express our desire, to tell the truth about ourselves, to get our needs met and to protect our values. With a lyrical voice, we can transform a fragile self into a strong person. Lyrical work, as I conceive it, is different from writing poetry for a public audience; it is the therapeutic work of making someone fully present to themselves as a person first.
This work is not easy. Work always implies toil, which is a kind of pain, but some kinds of work are so meaningful and worthwhile that pain is transformed through it. According to the philosopher Elaine Scarry, “The more [work] realizes and transforms itself in its object, the closer it is to the imagination, to art, to culture; the more it is unable to bring forth an object or, bringing it forth, is then cut off from its object, the more it approaches the condition of pain.” The object of lyrical work is presence. Those who have experienced the breakdown of presence are familiar with some of the worst conditions of suffering, meaninglessness, and despair. Lyrical work helps us approach the condition of persons who feel their place in the world and align with their values in action to participate in mutually supportive relationships.
