#16 Patient as Pilgrim
David Whyte, Modern Psychoanalysis and The Journey to Saying Everything
Psychoanalysis is predominantly studied in academic training institutions and through academic writing, but it is ultimately a tool utilised in the everyday lives of patients and therapists in the pursuit of healing, understanding and vitality. When we limit our exploration of psychoanalytic concepts to the realm of academia, we are limited to the modes of inquiry and uses of language that are ordained as legitimate within it. Thankfully, analysts since Sigmund Freud — perhaps more than any other health-related or medical profession — have often ventured beyond the academy to incorporate concepts from nature, mysticism and the arts to deepen their understanding of our field.
is a Anglo-Irish poet, gifted in integrating the power of poetry into both corporate and everyday life. Through talks, walking tours (in the English, Irish and Italian countrysides), consulting work with major corporations not traditionally known for emotional vulnerability (including the World Bank and NASA) and his books of poetry and prose, Whyte reveals himself as a loving challenger of a culture of denial, suppression and excessive striving. He invites us into the realm of emotion as a pathway to finding the courage for true innovation and greater aliveness. I have also come to see his work as a useful tool in the understanding of the lived experience of being a patient or a therapist in psychoanalysis.
I was lucky enough to encounter David in person for the second time at a workshop he presented in Byron Bay in February 2025, following the release of his latest work, Consolations II (2025). The book is a follow up from his much beloved Consolations, and reinvigorates the definitions of everyday words (like ‘body’, ‘relationship’ and ‘care’) through small essays. This recent reacquaintance with David’s work has coincided with my deepening studies in modern psychoanalysis, a school of psychoanalytic thought founded by Hyman Spotnitz. I noticed in many moments of David’s talk, and in my subsequent revisiting of his poetry, the way in which many of the themes he returns to provide beautiful language for understanding the tenets of modern psychoanalytic treatment in an emotional and visceral way.
Modern Psychoanalysis and the Path of the Pilgrim
Modern psychoanalysis emphasises the goal of deepening one’s capacity to speak from an emotional truth (Spotnitz, 1950). This orientation to treatment births a framework not dissimilar to classical psychoanalysis, but with a different emphasis and atmosphere. The classical psychoanalyst presents to the patient as reserved and concertedly withholding of personal emotional expression. Their primary tool is verbal interpretation, with the goal of illuminating unconscious material through the patient’s free associations. The modern analyst, in contrast, seeks to make close emotional contact with the patient and to allow themselves to be sincerely impacted by the patient. Their emotional responsiveness can then function as a healing tool in place of interpretation (Luiz, 2018). This model is well suited to the treatment of patients with more severe disturbances, who may be unable to receive verbal interpretations as a means of support. I have also found that it allows for the emergence and acknowledgement of more severely wounded parts of otherwise ‘high-functioning’ and externally organised people.
Modern psychoanalysis acknowledges a spontaneous, sincere experience between patient and analyst, in which the analyst walks alongside the patient as a fellow journeyer, attending to their own unfolding path. The analyst pays particular attention to their countertransference, not to prevent its intrusion on the treatment, nor only for information, but as a technique, enabling the analyst to respond to the patient in real-time and make active contact with them.
The workshop I attended with Whyte focussed on his memories, stories and poems of his travels in Spain and the Mediterranean. He cited many works from Pilgrim (2012), a collection of his work celebrating great journeys and including several poems inspired by the Camino de Santiago, the ancient Catholic pilgrimage culminating in the northwest of Spain. Whyte invites one to find the courage they need for their own unique journey into the unknown, honouring their soul’s desire for bigger and more dangerous worlds. As such, he speaks of the the role of the pilgrim with great reverence. The pilgrim, Whyte says, like the patient, decides to undertake the pilgrimage in anticipation that something new and unforeseeable will happen to them. This is in spite of the fact that, in the case of both the Camino de Santiago and a psychoanalytic treatment, they journey on a well established path walked by many before them. Of the decision to take up this role, he writes:
But your loss brought you here to walk
under one name and one name only,
and to find the guise under which all loss can live;
(2012, p. 11)
The Camino, for the pilgrim, functions like a therapeutic frame, holding the structure of the journey in a reverent container in which a new, spontaneous experience can unfold. Spotnitz noticeably does not discuss the psychoanalytic frame in explicit, technical terms the way of his colleagues and predecessors. That said, his approach deeply reimagines the function and flexibility of the frame in practice, even if he does not name it as such. Spotnitz positions the analyst as a fellow pilgrim, another traveller traversing a shared landscape with the patient, open to the impact of what unfolds around and between them and attuned to the healing power of the shared pilgrimage.
The modern analyst primarily seeks to emotionally join with their patient through communications that are chosen to encourage the patient to say everything and to feel comfortable being as emotionally open as possible. These goals for treatment stand in contrast to the pursuit of symptom reduction, or even greater insight into one’s patterns of being. This framework emphasises emotional flexibility on the part of the therapist and thus cultivates a journey for the patient and therapist of a certain felt quality, one that is often richly articulated in Whyte’s work. At his workshop, he quoted For the Road to Santiago (2022):
For the road to Santiago
Don’t make new declarations
About what to bring and what to leave behind
Just bring what you have
You were always going that way anyway
You were always going that way all along.
This excerpt extends an invitation like that offered to the analysand, echoing the psychoanalytic reverence for all parts of the patient’s self, and the analyst’s aspiration to welcome all forms of emotion, communication, and defence. With a willingness to join with resistance, to be open even in the face of aggression, rage, hatred and silence, and with the goal of allowing the patient to say what was previously unsayable, the modern psychoanalyst pursues in the patient what Whyte (2022) calls:
the part of you
you thought
was foolish,
the wisest voice of all.
Therapeutic Change and Countertransference
Whyte often makes compelling arguments in favour of courageous truthfulness. He sees what he calls ‘the voice at the edge’ (1994) — the part of the self that lives just beyond our current roles, routines, and defences — as a protective force against corporate burnout, disconnection from the self and loss of integrity. This orientation aligns deeply with the goals of psychoanalysis, and with Spotnitz’s particular understanding of therapeutic change, not as the achievement of insight, but as the emergence of the capacity to express emotion honestly and bring it into relationship. Whyte’s poem The Opening of Eyes (2019) illustrates this:
That day I saw beneath dark clouds
the passing of light over the water
and I heard the voice of the world speak out.
I knew then as I had before
life is no passing memory of what has been,
nor the remaining pages in a great book waiting
to be read.
It is the opening of eyes long closed.
It is the vision of far off things
seen for the silence they hold.
It is the heart after years
of secret conversing
speaking out loud in the clear air.
While the analyst patiently facilitates the “opening of eyes long closed”, the phrase “years of secret conversing” speaks to how countertransference can be experienced and translated in service of this goal. Modern psychoanalysis notably focusses on the treatment of narcissistic and more severely disturbed patients, for whom verbal expression can be limited. Special emphasis is placed on the therapist’s countertransference as a clue to what is still non- or pre-verbal in the patient. The analyst’s own feelings - confusion, annoyance, warmth, sadness - function as instruments of emotional contact, communications from the patient’s unconscious transmitted through the analyst's body and mind (Luiz, 2018). In working with patients who have never known themselves as subjects in a dialogue, the therapist uses their countertransference a kind of compass, helping to hold the emotional material that has long remained “in secret.” Whyte summarises the analyst’s job in his much beloved poem, Sweet Darkness (1997):
Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.
The poem finishes with hopeful instructions for the patient, readying themselves to surrender their long-held defences:
Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.
Whyte’s poetry and Spotnitz’s modern psychoanalysis share a sacred regard for the hidden truths that emerge through courage, openness and deep relational presence. Both the analyst and the poet ask us to walk into the unknown, carrying only what we have, trusting that healing arises not from mastery, but from shared vulnerability, and a willingness to return again and again to the act of finding words for what we see, think and feel. Modern psychoanalysis, like good poetry (or in Whyte’s words, “language against which we have no defences”), invites us to say everything, to have the courageous conversation —and, as both therapists and patients, discover ourselves anew in the telling.
I’ll leave you with David’s recitation of one of my favourite poems of his: Everything Is Waiting For You, a faithful companion for days when faith is hard to find.
In love, and the pursuit of a shared path to a greater truth,
Kate
References
Luiz, C. (2018). The making of a psychoanalyst: Studies in emotional communication. Routledge.
Spotnitz, H. (1950). Modern psychoanalysis of the schizophrenic patient: Theory of the technique. Grune & Stratton.
Whyte, D. (1994). The heart aroused: Poetry and the preservation of the soul in corporate America. Currency/Doubleday.
Whyte, D. (1997). Sweet Darkness. In The house of belonging. Many Rivers Press.
Whyte, D. (2012). Camino. In Pilgrim. (pp. 11). Many Rivers Press.
Whyte, D. (2019). The opening of eyes. In Essentials. Many Rivers Press.
Whyte, D. (2022). Your prayer. In Still possible. Many Rivers Press.