Knowing psychoanalysis: knowing literature. What do we know?

What is the relationship between the kind of knowledge we accrue in psychoanalytic work and the kind of knowledge we gain via a work of literature? In this paper, I bring literature and psychoanalysis into a closer dialogue by attempting to show how literature - in this case a poem - might inform, illuminate or even transform our understanding of psychoanalysis. I aim to do this by juxtaposing a reading of Wordsworth’s poem ‘We are Seven’ with Ferenczi’s paper ‘Confusion of Tongues’. My comparison suggests that both disciplines bear witness to a particular way of knowing that attempts to articulate what Heaney calls ‘the complex burden of our own experience’.