The most inclusive rubric that can be proposed for the lyric poetry written in America immediately after World War II is 'Freudian lyric' as many of the poets of postwar America found in the therapeutic hour (and its textual support in Freud's writings) not only themes for their poetry, but also new formal procedures shaping it. The choice is made here of Berryman's Dream songs because he is notably original in his Freudian inventions, and because his Dream Songs is a sequence drawing on the successivity of therapeutic interviews with their small anecdotal narratives.Berryman had a good deal of experience with breakdowns and psychotherapeutic interventions. He was also an intellectual who had read widely in Freudand broke an early 'intellectual' verse style to invent a far more colloquial and quotidian sort of poetry influenced, maybe, by the primal sort of conversation that takes place in therapy. Another factor behind choosing Berryman is that he encountered a metaphysical void in leaving behind formal religion and found the Freudian master-narrative, with its emphasis on the inner life, a congenial replacement. He saw in the material of American daily life processed in the therapeutic hour a subject matter relatively untouched by literary conventions and he followed the Muse of free association as a path to the Muse of lyric.