Remembering Bambi : Notes on Care, Creativity, and Community

Taking the entanglement of poetry and psychiatry in the author’s life as a starting point, this lyric, autotheoretical essay explores the place of creativity in care, broadly defined, and vice versa. The essay braids together several strands: the author’s personal and family history of immigration; the history of Angel Island Immigration Station, where hundreds of thousands of Chinese immigrants were detained between 1910 and 1940; notes on the 1942 animated film Bambi; relational psychoanalytic theory; and the author’s own poetic-psychiatric practice. Departing from more traditionally academic psychoanalytic writing, the essay enacts through its lyric, associative form the very model of care it theorizes, which beholds in each person a history of selves and relations, and bears witness not only to the present but also to the past. Ultimately, the author argues that by returning us to a feeling of time as layered and simultaneous rather than linear, poetry has the ability to form the basis of an ethics of care—one that recognizes, and does not turn away from, histories of violence and the feelings lodged inside of us by that violence.