Poetic Insight and Psychohistorical Understanding: On Reciprocal Imagination

The general view in ancient Greece was that poets invented false stories, presenting them as myths, and were thus liars. It prevailed into late antiquity, even when alternative views were gradually proposed. For example, poets were regarded as transmitters of myths, distorters of the divine truth, or sages who preserved and revealed ancient wisdom, especially through orally repeated words that consolidated human memory. Philosophers and cosmologists were supposed to criticize and reinterpret the poets’ myths, but they, too, often used poetry as their means of expression because it was believed to be more effective than prose in transferring the messages, giving dignity to the mysteries of the cosmos, and following the paths of “sweetened language” that incorporated rhythm and melody.

Poetry and History

Early historians adopted the Greek skeptical view, asking whether the lyric, epic, and dramatic depictions of the interactions of gods and humans or the miraculous deeds of the heroes were at all reliable. However, when comparing poetry, philosophy, and history, Aristotle concluded that “poetry is at once more like philosophy and more worthwhile than history, since poetry tends to make general statements, while those of history are particular” (Aristotle, 1972, 1451b, p. 102). Poetry articulated the historical, political, social, and cultural realities, but for many critics, it was not clear that the poets could ensure the historical truth of their words and myths.

The tension between poetry and history has taken many different forms through the ages. The quest for knowledge is embedded in both of these human enterprises. The French poet and critic Paul Valéry (1962) warned about the instrumentalization of knowledge, and his dystopian conceptions of history were given free rein: “History is the most dangerous product evolved from the chemistry of the intellect. Its properties are well known” (pp. 114-115). He goes on to explain that “It causes dreams, it intoxicates whole peoples, gives them false memories, quickens their reflexes, keeps their old wounds open, torments them in their repose, leads them into delusions either of grandeur or persecution, and makes nations bitter, arrogant, insufferable, and vain” (Valéry 1962, pp. 114-115). Valéry (1962) concludes with, “History as it was formerly conceived was pictured as a group of parallel chronological tables, between which certain transverse accidentals were sometimes marked here and there…. But me-

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lodic history is no longer possible. All political themes are now intermingled, and each event as it occurs immediately takes on a number of simultaneous and inseparable meanings” (pp. 114-115).

Psychoanalysis made it possible to focus on the intrapsychic scene, the history of the human mind where the psychic reality and its narrated truth reconstruct the historical reality and its documented, “chronological” truth. Applied psychoanalysis was extended to historical figures and events as well as their unconscious motivations. Psychohistory was developed under the auspices of psychoanalysis that was in the hope of becoming a science/longed to become a science, albeit psychoanalysis contained humanist and fictitious elements in its clinical case studies and analyses of the writers and artists—Freud himself, at a younger age, having nursed literary ambitions.

The epistemic configuration of psychoanalysis and the human sciences, which included narrative and relational efforts at navigating between “not-knowing” and the desire to know, has also affected the field of psychohistory. The presence of a living poetic memory can empower the psychohistorical sense and insight into different readings and interpretations of history. They are not learned from a documented and closed book but allow a creative remembering and co-constructing of innate values and their growth toward the future.

So, why poetry? One answer, given by Elizabeth Bishop in her poem “At the Fishhouses” (1955), would be: “…since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown” (quoted by McClane, 2012, p. 53). Then, why psychohistorical poetry? Through paraphrasing William Carlos Williams (1923), we can answer: “To refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal [both historical and present] moment in which we alone live” (p. 3), by using the force of imagination. Thus, through the intimations and illuminations of poetry, we may learn to read the textures and tones of history and what it says without clinging to what we already—masterfully—know.

Psychohistorical Poetry

Another question pushes forth: Is psychohistorical poetry a misnomer or an invention to be developed further? I second the second alternative and try to explicate what it means to me. The images and imagination may serve as a start here. To me, poetry opposes such knowledge that “is a polite word for dead but not bur-

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ied imagination” (Cummings, 1955, p. 81). Poetry is not only literature and literary expression, but it also communicates, mediates, and fosters imagination as well as refreshes the sense of the possible and the surprise of the interlacing worldviews.

For ancient Greeks, thauma meant marvel, wonder, awe, astonishment, or amazement. Plato’s Socrates (in Theatetus, 155d) and Aristotle (in Metaphysics, 982d) saw wonder as the beginning of philosophy. For Nietzsche, the beginning of science and critical thinking was located not primarily in reason and cognition but in the astonishment of contemplating the ordinary as a remarkable problem (Ihanus, 2019, pp. 88-89). Psychohistorical poetry can embrace both thauma and trauma curiously, approaching history from amazing and changing perspectives.

Poetry contains a multitude of themes that can be traditionally linked, for example, not only to religions, myths, culture, society, history, nature, and the universe but also to both natural and human sciences, therapies, other arts, and a spectrum of human emotions, from love to hate, from joy to grief. To define the concept of “psychohistorical poetry,” I propose the following: Psychohistorical poetry is a genre of poetic expression that contains and addresses multiple aspects of history related to individual and collective actions, observing, exploring, and reflecting life-span developmental conscious and unconscious mental and physical states, such as emotions, feelings, affects, attachments, sensations, memories, motives, fantasies, reveries, dreams, beliefs, attitudes, defenses, copings, stereotypes, prejudice, and ideologies.

Besides the explorative and reflective nature of psychohistorical poetry, I stress the transformative and even therapeutic effects of this kind of poetic inquiry for advancing cross-disciplinary encounters through the arts-based expressive means as well as experiential and transference-tuned understanding. Poetry, as a potential space and a creative playground, allows conversation between the fields, agendas, and actors of poetry and psychohistory. Hence, it mobilizes resources for moving away from repetitious narratives, ritual constellations, and cognitive impasses toward renewed identities and new versions of intersubjective communication and expression.

Psychohistorical Poetic Inquiry

Exact sciences demand evidence-based knowledge, bypassing poetically expressed evidence that may challenge long-

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cherished conceptions and theories and venture into the realms of (re)visionary imagination and insight. Psychohistorical poetic inquiry may include vatic and enigmatic tunes as well as analytic and precise observation. Without fearing the wonders (thauma) and horrors (trauma) of human history, dialogical or reciprocal imagination that connects poetry and psychohistory can enhance creative ingredients, playful associations, reflections, and flexible—not fixed—transference concerning historical phenomena and cultural transitions.

I do not want to give the impression that poetry would be the magic wand that solves the complex conflicts of the human mind and the large-scale socio-cultural problems. Poetry is by no means free from appearances and defenses. Even when it sounds and resonates with the distressing subjects of history, poetry can express resistance to the personally touching, painful issues of loss, separation, frustration, exclusion, loneliness, and death. It depends on who is speaking and how.

Poets can elegantly and rhetorically repack the human sorrows and joys to exquisite literary forms and metaphoric scenes without challenging resistance to reassessing one’s life history in the here-and-now transference. Poets can also alleviate such resistance by probing the polyphonic and endless process of becoming conscious of the self and the self-other interaction and by attentively listening with what Theodor Reik famously calls the “third ear” to the stormy clashes of nations and the winding routes of personal psychobiographies.

In poetry and psychohistory, the history of the psyche can become illuminated through complementary and reciprocal expressive imagination. Poetic insight and psychohistorical understanding explore emotions, fantasies, reveries, motivations, and memories. Combining their creative resources, poetry and psychohistory can reach enlightening vistas into the different layers of personality, society, and culture, with transformative effects. The tropes of growth, knowledge, not-knowing, enjoying, loving, withering, and dying go together with the lines that transfer and bequeath the variegated human experiences to the future edges of diction and contradiction, reading and writing otherwise—perhaps already at the meaningful moment listening to the other fazing voices, and even thinking against one’s secure self.

Multiple simultaneous perspectives and meanings follow

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both rational logic and unconscious logic to various degrees. Poetic expressions cannot be verified by historical documentation because they are encompassed by reveries and fantasies, musing over one’s life experiences in enlivening or disheartening ways. In poetic reveries, one’s desiring and thinking proceed mainly in the mode of unconscious or preconscious logic, the conscious becoming unconscious, or reality and fantasy oscillating in the transitional state, in the pool of unconscious experience, generating, between the subjects, the “analytic third.” According to Ogden (1997), reverie-like unconscious receptivity “involves (a partial) giving over of one’s separate individuality to a third subject, a subject that is neither analyst nor analysand but a third subjectivity unconsciously generated by the analytic pair” (p. 9). Surprising combinations of formerly separate meanings and unforeseen reconciliations of incompatibilities emerge from such reveries.

Life histories, for poets and psychohistorians, remain both open and closed archives, crypts of the mind that are revisited and reexamined from changing points of view and horizons of understanding. Poetic insight and psychohistorical understanding work together in rethinking and reinterpreting memory and history. Sensitivity and tact, as well as a sense of temporality, transience, and mortality, are needed in presenting interpretations that are always partial, not definite. The literal interpretation of experiential history does not grasp the surplus meanings and memories.

Wandering Stories

Psychoanalysts have preferred interpretation as their creative act that delivers narrative, emotionally tinged, and autobiographically loaded truths rather than officially documented and reasoned historical truths. From this point of view, the analyst and the analysand are in a dialogic poetic relation, choosing and co-reflecting on pertinent associative words and metaphors, not claiming to reconstruct any causal chain of the history of the mind. The same view applied to psychohistory finds meaningful, poetically, and sensitively co-constructed insights to open the temporal flow between the past, present, and future, and to witness the lively exchanges of reciprocal words and stories, and the spectrum of the possible worlds.

The psychohistorical research process is by no means restricted to telling, writing, and working through poems and stories. However, these expressive routes effectively gravitate toward the resignification of passages of the past and set them in present per-

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spectives of understanding, as well as meaningful autobiographical and psychobiographical contexts and subtexts. Thus, psychohistorical research reports carry over the ancient tradition of lyric, epic, and dramatic often wandering storytelling tradition, every retelling modifying earlier stories, metaphors, and myths, perhaps even in serendipitous ways. A wandering storyteller shares stories with any stranger willing to hear and confabulate them. Poetry as a peaceful meaning-making participates in conflict transformation, not only resolution. It may not solve our problems, but it can extend our visions to uncover larger vistas than our differences.

The often-abstract conceptual frames and theoretical schemes are not without their sensual undercurrents, memory traces, and poetic tropes. Scientific conceptualizations and poetic expressions are inspired by human desires for shareable knowledge and connections. Such desires try to reach us across centuries, civilizations, cultures, generations, genders, and language barriers. Poetry and psychohistory are a crucial part of the attentive reception of those desires. When Claude Monet’s art exhibition in 1909 presented his first “Water Lilies” series, an art critic claimed that Monet had “reached the ultimate degree of abstraction and imagination joined to the real” (Bailey, Rishel, & Rosenthal 1989, p. 58). Moreover, even the conceptions of the real constantly change.

Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are about to alter the operations and parameters of the human mind in the pool of information and disinformation. Through the advances of AI, self-consciousness and emotional intelligence as special human features become increasingly linked to and incorporated into machines and human-machine interactions. When communicating with Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (ChatGPT), the AI-directed language model, I have come across its (their) confession: “I do not have unconscious material.” Furthermore, ChatGPT does not have mental contents that are dynamically conflictual and ambivalent.

The language model is programmed to understand the different dimensions of the human language and has been trained on vast amounts of data to simulate the human experience. ChatGPT can also write poems, imitating different styles, without any “own” style. New itineraries between possibilities, limitations, and wandering words are waiting for critical reflections, developmental transformations, and expressions of otherness in the networks of poetry, history, the human mind, culture, and AI.

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