Poetry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychohistory: A Renewed Understanding

One of the aims of psychohistory is to formulate paradigms for understanding how unconscious processes motivate human behavior and shape culture. Yet the social sciences have largely overlooked the essential role of these processes in the creation and reception of literary works, the basic components of any meaningful psychohistory of the arts. This paper investigates the continuous connections of psychoanalysis, psychohistory, and poetry. It also explores the quiet, liminal spaces that go beyond the boundaries of ego organization and account for the mysterious and transformational aspects of myth, dream, and imagination in literary expression.

Psychoanalysis provides a modern point of entry into that transcendent realm; but long before psychoanalysis began, literature was a way of exploring the crucial questions at the core of human understanding and development. Poetry, like psychoanalysis, affords us the possibility of looking at human issues from multiple, often unexpected, vantage points from which the gap between the known and the unknown may be laid open to intermediate and redemptive interpretations. Psychoanalysis and poetry both have their starting points in emotion, symbols, and associations, but to different ends: One is analytic, and the other is generative. Winnicott suggests that the two trajectories may be linked, with the psychoanalytic journey fostering one’s potential for creative, literary inquiry. In my view, the analysand and the writer are similarly tasked with a struggle to remember, ostensibly to vanquish a trou-

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bled past. For each, language is often a labor of unburying the buried.

Over the years, I have been writing about poets and writers who have used psychoanalytic processes to mine the unconscious and disclose certain truths about the psyche. Psychoanalysis emerged out of Freud’s own self-analysis combined with analyses of his hysterical patients. One of them was Bertha Pappenheim, who came to be known as Anna O. She coined the phrase “chimney sweeping” to describe Freud’s systematic attempt to expose the repressed contents of the unconscious as the source of somatic symptoms. Similarly, many poets’ accounts of writing about the inner turbulence of their lives have stressed the therapeutic function of their creative work. Some began writing poetry as psychiatric patients seeking catharsis—but they invariably understood the importance of poetic craft in recapitulating the meaning of their personal experiences.

Because art demands a certain amount of detachment (even if this detachment is subordinated to the exigency of communicating something meaningful in the rendering of qualitative elements), artistic activity perhaps accelerates the therapeutic process. But more fundamentally, literature affords the possibility of a vicarious experience. Materials of expression must be molded appropriately to achieve a particular effect. This investment in the universal and timeless principles of the art—and here, my focus is poetry—as a sensory vehicle enables the artist to step back from subjectivity and become, for lack of a better word, more objective, paradoxically losing the self in order to find it. Indeed, the stereotype of the suffering artist has some truth to it—as Freud knew—for relief exists in connection with sublimating, or redirecting, unacceptable impulses. Freud, no stranger to the power of literary perception, whether discussing creative writers or daydreaming patients, used the term Spiel (play) to describe the forms of imaginative writing that actually carry out the unrealized wishes of the players or writers themselves and provide a necessary outlet for bearing such wishes.

In “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming” (1959), Freud connected the play of children with the fantasies of adult creative writers and posited the idea that creativity derives from repressed material that is manifested through imaginative expression. The experience of creating is thus construed as an anticipatory stage of fore-pleasure, bringing fantasies into signification, configuring a

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reality-breeding arena of extended play. For instance, tragedy can be safely fantasized without causing harm to the creator/player; emotions represented in the imagined venue may be experienced as enjoyment rather than hardship.

As children grow up, they generally cease to play with objects that had once signified realities and mature to engage instead in the symbolic realm of daydreaming. Restoring phantoms or figures of fantasy results in a kind of floatation of word-images. The creative writer emerges to select among these signifiers, discarding some and keeping others. Hence, creative writing (as a Spiel activity) is parallel to syntactical play—assuming that we are given a set (a universe) of possibilities out of which new things emerge from disrupting and reforming contiguities, sequences, and predictable linkages. This process may mark a considerable regression to infantile aggressions and repressed wishes we have protectively concealed from ourselves. Opening these up again may take a distorted form. The effort to bring about an aesthetic product of art helps the artist to discharge emotion into a rational and more unified arrangement.

Freud also believed that images associated with primitive emotions float to the surface, but, as is typical of dreams, this material may be disguised or concealed through symbols that may appear to conflict with what they are meant to represent. The mechanisms of substitution and displacement that operate in dreamwork can be applied to the writing process, which, in the confessional mode at least, may rely solely on unconscious exercises of free association. In Interpretation of Dreams (1899), Freud writes about the presence of “involuntary ideas” in dreams and art by relaxing the rational control over the imagination. He posits the unconscious as that region of the psyche that is both submerged and elusive. What emerges from the unconscious—whether on the therapist’s couch or the writer’s page—is outside the control of the individual to the extent that the internal structures of language at a given stage of mental development pose obstruction.

Freud identified socially unacceptable egoistic and erotic wishes as significant motivations for turning to fantasy and daydreaming. Discoveries about the creative unconscious and the surfacing of “unacceptable egoistic and erotic wishes” that create guilt and shame were extrapolated from Freudian theory and led to the idea that psychoanalysis was a means of confessing shame (Freud, 1959, p. 142). From these ideas, Freud cobbled out several propo-

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sitions that portray creative writers (inclusive of poets) as egoistic, positing the writer’s self within the identity of the hero; thus, literature is fundamentally autobiographical. Indeed, the creative writer is viewed as a borderline neurotic, finding a healthy release in the imaginative activity so that creativity is a substitute for neurotic symptomatology.

Of most interest to my discussion here is Freud’s insight that writing is a form of confession similar to the confession a patient makes to his or her analyst. We live vicariously through the volatility as well as the pleasure of the writer. Freud’s understanding of the imagination ushered in a theory of artistic inception and creation that dominated 20^th century art and poetry, from modernism to symbolism to confessionalism and new formalism. Highly creative individuals show the capacity to conceive and utilize two or more opposite or contradictory ideas simultaneously without being disturbed by this simultaneity resulting in a paradox. Poetic creation involves a type of Janus-thinking where novel combinations of associative elements may well facilitate profound insights. Indeed, patients in analysis can be encouraged to relay metaphors to further therapeutic effect.

In Freud’s judgment, the artist is responsible for creating the art object but lacks the rationality to properly understand it, a proposition that American poet Anne Sexton (1977) wrote about in her last autobiographical essay: “[M]y newest poems…they come from a part of me I don’t know, haven’t met and won’t understand for a couple of years. They know things I don’t know myself” (p. 33). Sexton, as most readers know, began writing her nationally recognized poetry when hospitalized for mental illness. It was her therapy with Martin Orne that provided the catalyst for her poetry—the two processes coincided with her struggle to overcome her demons and, tragically, ended in suicide.

One particular movement in the 20^th century is most indicative of the overlapping of psychoanalytic thought and poetic process. Since the 1950s, under the sway of Robert Lowell (who taught both Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton in the same poetry workshop), the transgressive narrative in American poetry, which attempts to subvert the status quo overseen by traditional hierarchical institutions (e.g., the domicile, social orders, and even psychiatric institutions), erupted in artistic circles where passions overruled reasonable standards of decorum. In 1959, M. L. Rosenthal defined confessional poetry as writing that confronted private humiliations,

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sufferings, and psychological problems; he intended without question to point to the writers themselves.

Poetry is one means of discharging fraught emotions in a socially acceptable container and sublimating self-destructive urges within language’s constellation. Although confessionalism is often associated with private trauma, the background of confessionalism encompasses the convergence of anxieties commonly experienced by the post-World War II generation and also arising from the individual’s dissociation from religious, social, and moral values that formerly had stabilized one’s function in society. One manifestation of these anxieties was a national near-obsession with romanticizing, and even glorifying, mental illness in cult films such as King of Hearts (1966) where the patients literally take over the asylum, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), The Bell Jar (1979), The Snake Pit (1948), David and Lisa (1962), and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1977). Women patients in these films were often stereotyped as dangerous and seductive, aligning women with madness and threatening the order of the psychiatric establishment.

Lowell’s provocative autobiographical work Life Studies (1959) was highly influential in the 1950s, widely spurring poets to explore psychiatric themes surrounding taboo subjects such as alcoholism, corruption, and family dysfunction. It forces both poet and reader to examine the “content” of the “self,” or personality, through its own alienation, giving way to private insights about one’s own banal and even shocking experience. Lowell did not avoid realistic aspects of human nature, including cruelty and ugliness. Instead, he affirmed their validity as human qualifiers worthy of “study” alongside the more acceptable human emotions of pleasure, delight, and beauty. As much as the pessimism of the self is explored, light overwhelms darkness through the affirmative use of voice as a reflection of social constructions. Like the Puritan confessor, the confessional poet has no assistance in the act of confession but bears, as the psychiatric patient does, self-consciousness alone.

Following Lowell, second-generation confessional poets took their own debasement to more shocking extremes, such as incest, suicide, and domestic violence, rebelling against societal pressures to be passively silent. Women writers in particular confessed not only their victimization but also their participation in the sadomasochistic—but by giving voice to their agency in poetry, they

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awakened a sleeping giant of suppression. A prime example is Plath’s “Daddy,” the famed poem in which she compares her father’s overbearing to that of the Gestapo Luftwaffe and imagines herself as a Jew. She claims the voice of the iconic victim in a world that has lost both order and rationality. Speaking back to an oppressive patriarchy, the poem opens in brave defiance:

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you. (Plath, 1981, p. 272)

Yet even as Plath is exercising the confessional impulse to revisit her childhood traumas—her father’s death when she was eight years old and her own suicide attempts—contemporary readings of the poem have become more critical of Plath’s conflation of herself as a Holocaust victim. Plath’s effort to gain agency through her poetic voice by articulating and claiming power that she desperately lacked in her youth begs a reading of the poem from a psychohistorical or psychobiographical perspective regarding feminism and the ideological principle of equality. Although the myth surrounding her is often of a suicidal temptress, she, like Lowell, is more comfortable as a child persona, for whom power is still elusive but words pave the path outward.

What all of the confessional poets had in common was that they sought moments in life that were of pain more than pleasure and saw such moments as epitomes of the general condition of humanity. But more significantly, these poets turned inward to reflect on their own histories, seeking the origins of their mental afflictions and working through memories of personal shame or abuse. Writing things out, like talking things out, was an alternative to otherwise confronting or perpetuating symptomatic behaviors. Private pain is not the sole province of the individual. It is more than that; it is symptomatic of a larger society. The benefits of literary imagining implicitly point to the shift in contemporary poetry, the inflection point in the culture where the poet’s desire to address a psychic injury became one with the wish to create an aesthetic object that would reverberate for the reader. Psychic content became a discursive form.

One notable example of poets using psychoanalytic theory

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to further self-understanding is captured in Plath’s journal, where she sees herself in Freud’s description of melancholia, recognizing that she had compensated for the loss of her father by trying to fill her mother’s sense of emptiness, so much so that her mother seemed to be a vampire ready to suck the life out of her:

Read Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia this morning: An almost exact description of my feelings and reasons for suicide: a transferred murderous impulse from my mother onto myself: the ‘vampire’ metaphor Freud uses, draining the ego’ that is exactly the feeling I have getting in the way of my writing: Mother’s clutch. I mask my self-abasement (a transferred hate of her) and weave it with my own real dissatisfactions within myself. (Plath & Hughes, 1982, p. 279)

Plath’s entry, like confessional poetry as a movement, is emblematic of the entwining of the social, political, and individual psychological struggles that became essential to our understanding of contemporary culture. Whether we look from the perspective of the poet or the reader, history has become more and more an internal process of autobiography or biography, something that lends itself to. The emergence of the confessional poets and their literary works resonate persistently within the project of psychohistory itself. The confessional movement and its influence on contemporary literature emanate from the moment when psychohistory is, of course, involved in historical research. As Peter Loewenberg writes, “it combines historical analysis with social science models, humanistic sensibility, and psychodynamic theory and clinical insights to create a fuller, more rounded view of life in the past” (see https://cliospsyche.org/psychohistory#definitions). My approach to the topic of psychoanalysis and poetry is hermeneutical, which was Freud’s process of decoding the language of hysterics and titrating his analyses until he felt that the patient was ready to hear them. One can think of the text as a baseline, and the variables have to do with the inner complexities of history, psychology, and culture. While much poetry written in the late 20^th century is often considered to be excessively private and self-victimizing, it is actually a public discourse that can promote awareness by interrogating the institutions and policies that have impeded human lives.

Poetry as a psychotherapeutic intervention has given credence to poetry therapy, which uses artful language in capacities where explicit or ordinary language fails to engage the depth of feeling an individual experiences in troubling times. Creativity de-

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velops a personal meaning system and world that is insular while simultaneously connecting with others through a poetic consciousness. There is a human need to symbolize or represent via external forms of emotions and images that are purely internal. Poetry is also non-linear and allows for the condensation and displacement of various defenses and feelings, sometimes even hostile ones. Indeed, psychoanalysis finds the sources of depression in the niches of memory, unconscious, and conscious, and it often indulges in aspects of regressive narcissism that attack the object as a part of itself.

Yet, poetry is an art that weds sound and sense, transcendent meaning and musicality. Poetry includes more than an individual’s self-vigilance; it also includes a community’s capacity to be both supportive and critical. It can promote awareness by interrogating the institutions and policies that have impeded human lives, as well as a beginning for mutual understanding.

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