Of Heart and Mind

In his new book, Of Heart and Mind: A Psychiatrist's Poems, retired physician, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst Dr. Peter Alan Olsson shares the poetry that made his difficult career meaningful.

He notes, "My personal use of poetry, or prose writing, helped me manage soul-sadness by discharging, soothing, containing or sublimating the realities of my work life in psychiatry and psychoanalysis. At a personal level, I often feel that my poems write me in an almost mystical sense. They help me heal my pain, celebrate my artistic gift and express my feelings."

As he writes in his poem "My Lovely Dream Dancer":

In the delicious, relaxed, loving domain before dawn, we touch like two dream dancers reluctant to awaken ... and the music of our love is too sweet to interrupt. The grasping demands of the day loom like mine fields, but become bearable because we will dance again tonight.

Author Bio : Peter Alan Olsson, M.D., trained at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. After an internship in mixed medicine at the University of Vermont, he took a psychiatry residency at Baylor (1968-1971). He served as a psychiatrist at Oakland Naval Hospital from 1971-73 running the substance abuse unit, working with the POWs returning from Vietnam prisons. He later graduated from the Houston-Galveston Psychoanalytic Institute in Houston and practiced psychiatry and psychotherapy while teaching psychotherapy in Houston for 25 years, and later in New Hampshire (1995-2011). Retiring from clinical work in 2011, the author was formerly an assistant professor of psychiatry at Dartmouth Medical School and an adjunct professor of clinical psychiatry at Baylor. Dr. Olsson is a Fellow of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and a distinguished life fellow of the American Psychiatric Association.