Rhyme and Reason : Psychiatrist Uses Poetry to Help Unravel Patients’ Problems

It was a helicopter crash in Vietnam that led Whittier psychiatrist Owen Heninger to discover the healing power of poetry therapy.

A young soldier killed in the crash was the son of one of Heninger’s patients, a dentist who had helped his son overcome some physical obstacles so he could enlist in the Army. After the young man’s death, the father was overwhelmed with remorse, blaming himself, feeling suicidal. Heninger had been treating the man for about a month, but wasn’t making much progress.

Then Heninger remembered a poem he had learned in high school.

Heninger, 64, had never been much of a poetry enthusiast. There never seemed to be time for it. He’d been a soldier in the Korean War, then a pre-med student at Brigham Young University, then a medical school student, a doctor, a psychiatrist. He was a scientist, not a dreamy poetry lover.

Still, there was something about the poem that he remembered. The poem was Matthew Arnold’s “Sohrab and Rustum,” an adaptation of an ancient Persian work about a warrior who mistakenly kills his own son. It reads, in part:

For some are born to do great deeds, and live,

As some are born to be obscured, and die. Do thou the deeds I die too young to do, And reap a second glory in thine age: Thou art my father, and thy gain is mine.

“He didn’t get to talk to his son before he died,” Heninger says, “and I thought that the words the son says in the poem might give him solace.”

After Heninger gave him the poem, the father came out of his depression and was able to go back to work, the psychiatrist says.

Heninger didn’t make too much of it at the time, but about seven years later he was treating a woman also suffering from depression over a child’s death. Recalling the earlier case, Heninger suggested that the woman read and write poetry.

“When I read the poems she wrote, I saw that she was saying things she couldn’t or wouldn’t say in therapy,” Heninger says.

In particular, Heninger says, a poem the woman wrote revealed her hatred for her brother-in-law, whom she blamed for her daughter’s death.

Heninger used the feelings revealed in the poem to treat the woman. “Eventually she recovered,” Heninger says.

Success with two patients made him realize that poetry could be helpful in his work. “I put two and two together. Here were two people who had recovered through this unusual treatment involving poetry. . . . I just stumbled onto it, like the guy who used mold to treat a wound and later found out it was penicillin.”

What Heninger had stumbled onto was in fact a longstanding but relatively obscure form of therapy that a few psychologists and psychiatrists were already using.

After attending a UCLA course on poetry therapy taught by psychologist Arthur Lerner, a pioneer in the field who had been using it since the 1940s, Heninger jumped into poetry therapy with both feet.

Although he already had enough degrees to fill a good-sized wall, he went back to school, taking literature and poetry classes at Rio Hondo College and Cal State Fullerton while maintaining his practice. Last summer, he received a Registered Poetry Therapist Credential from the National Assn. for Poetry Therapy, one of only about a dozen mental health professionals who hold the title.

And what exactly is poetry therapy?

There are two forms, Heninger said. One involves exposing patients to poetry written by others that will “strike a healthful resonance” within the patient, such as the effect the Arnold poem had on the father of the dead soldier. One poet Heninger uses often with his patients is Emily Dickinson, who he admits is his favorite.

“She has written poems that describe post-traumatic stress disorder better than the textbooks,” Heninger says, citing a Dickinson poem that includes the lines, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes.”

The other, more active form of poetry therapy involves poetry written by the patient, which Heninger says can serve as “a window to the soul.”

“The ordinary defenses may be bypassed by poetry. . . . Writing poetry has allowed unconscious material to become conscious, overcoming or bypassing repression, and has brought about genuine self-recognition,” he wrote in a journal for mental health professionals.

Heninger goes over patients’ poetry with them, line by line, to uncover the meanings that they did not consciously know were there. Often, Heninger says, “poetry reveals, but it reveals by concealing. . . . Instead of saying ‘you dirty S.O.B.,’ you put it in poetic terms.”

Again Heninger cites Dickinson:

“Tell all the Truth but tell it slant-- Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth’s superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind

Although only a relative handful of Heninger’s patients are undergoing poetry therapy--he also uses more traditional forms of psychotherapy and medication--he believes there could be a value in it for almost everyone except the drug-addicted or extremely psychotic.

“There’s poetry in everybody,” he says, “although they may not think of it as poetry.”

Heninger and other advocates of poetry therapy admit that not everyone in the mental health field is sold on the concept.

“Not everyone is accepting of it,” says Lerner, editor of “Poetry in the Therapeutic Experience.” “But I think as there is gradually a better understanding of what it’s about, it is going to be used more and more.”

Heninger hopes that his scheduled appearance with Lerner and other poetry therapy experts at the American Psychiatric Assn. Convention in Philadelphia this year will generate interest among psychiatrists.

“If other psychiatrists find poetry therapy as useful as I have,” Heninger says, “I think it’s going to keep growing and growing and growing.”