Medicine, Psychotherapy and the Poetic Imagination (Elements in Health Humanities)

The clinical encounter is typically divided into medical interventions for body/ brain and psychotherapeutic interventions for mind/ emotions. In recent years, medical and psychotherapy education have undergone radical pedagogic (negative) transformations – justified on economic grounds. These have resulted in the adoption of a reductive instrumental values focus at the expense of education of deeper values: the historical, ethical, aesthetic, political, and transcendental (meaning). Observable competences displace assessment of potential as capabilities, where an education into professional identity through innovative curriculum design has been reduced to a set of syllabi producing technicians. In turn, this promotes focus on managed curriculum content over emergent process. Transformation in professional education is imperative, where innovative production of metaphor is seen to challenge a dominant reductive literalism. Poetry, embedded within a wider poetic imagination, provides the necessary medium through which a multiple values-based medicine and psychotherapy of quality may be restored.