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 nece