" In our highly scientific and technocratic culture, shamanesque figures and   their magical  incantations represent little more than superstitions and rituals that envelope the highly suggestible believers of primitive cultural  mythologies. And yet, Why is it that the treatment for madness is likely to do much better when provided by a shaman with witch-doctor potions in such countries as India and   Nigeria than when provided by a mental health professional with medical-doctor anti-psychotic medications in North America?…

What is the mystery, magic and muscle of the shaman's poesy of care – beyond not keeping people regularly medicated - that help so many people in these so-called  primitive countries? And how might these secrets of care contribute to an analytic way of presencing, knowing, and speaking in the analytic space?…

In pre-literate societies, the poet is the one assigned by the culture to be The One Who Remembers as an historian, mythmaker, and shaman.  As shaman, the poet   sees with eyes of fire that burn through the ordinariness of the world and perceive the wonders and terrors that lie beyond. Is the analytic practitioner not the one in  our culture who bears the sacred responsibility to be The One Who Remembers in words in the analytic space?  Is (s)he not a mind poet who speaks to the unworded poetry expressed in the overarching rhythms and patterns of everyday life? Do we see the world, people, and life through the poet’s eyes of fire?…

Through the ages, various cultures have recognized the poet’s responsibility to be The One Who Remembers.  In ancient Egypt, the poet was signified by the Arabic sha'ir, meaning The Knower; in Greece, by the Greek poeites, The Maker; in Rome,   by the Latin vates, The Seer; and, in the ancient Celtic nations, by the Gaelic seanchaidh, The Narrator. This essay gathers together this multi-cultural society of dead poets to speak from their respective wisdoms to something of the nature of the analytic space and the poetic utterances and understandings that unfold therein. In the context of process material, the unfinished sketch of The Radioactive Man is considered as it might be fleshed out in words through the eyes of the Dead Poets Society. In so doing, a contribution might be made to a way of understanding the sacred meanings of his frequent hospitalizations, their links with his phenomenal past, and the poetics of the sense-making of the non-sense-making in the analytic space…”

 From the paper, The Dead Poets Society…