The Psychopathology of Everyday Life: Poems by Linda A. W. Brakel

This volume’s title is an homage to Freud’s seminal work, “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life,” published in 1901. In these poems Brakel brings to bear her psychoanalytic and philosophical background, as well as her senses of pathos and humor.  This book contains poetic glimpses into family life, the mind and the body, loss and solidarity, humans and animals.

The first section, Relationships, explores father-daughter interactions, extended family, neighbors, and spousal bonds.  Death reappears in Section II States of Mind are States of Body. But the author tempers death with academics, ambition, physical deformity, and delusion. In Nations, States, Cities Brakel’s travels through the United States and Mexico come to the fore, as well as her sense of humor.  In Sections IV-VI the poet reacts to nature: seasons, landscapes, dogs (a favorite topic), birds, frogs, mice, moose, and amoebas.  Humor and paradox are prevalent in her Section VII: Concepts. She dedicates Section VIII: An Everyday Tragedy to her sister-in-law’s proximity and untimely death from leukemia.  Her final section, Coda—An End to “Everyday,” is a chronical of life, despair, and hope in the early days of the Covid 19 Pandemic.

The Psychopathology of Everyday Life: Poems is a sort of primer to L.A.W. Brakel’s world view and empathic capacities. One can say that in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life: Poems the author manages to go deep using simple language.

Dr. Brakel is a clinical psychoanalyst who has received journal prizes for her writing beginning when she was still a candidate. She has excelled as a mature psychoanalytic author, as a University of Michigan researcher on testable aspects of psychoanalytic theory, as well as for her academic contributions to the philosophy of action and mind.