Psychodynamic Correlates of Poetry

This study suggests a psychodynamic understanding of poetry as a process of continuous fluctuation between self and other, communication and non communication and, finally, as a dynamic of image and its destruction. Our claim is that a poem takes place at the area of creation of explicit communication and as such it is also faithful to the need to avoid any explicit communication, i.e. to the destruction of an image. It is thus offered that a poem is concerned not so much with specific representations but rather with the process of creation of representation. In order to investigate our hypothesis empirically, texts were examined using psycholinguistic measures. Our results support the suggested hypothesis and show poems to have a highly cyclical linguistic pattern, a pattern that could not be observed in texts other than poetry. A discussion of the results is offered in terms of the function of poetry as a process of creation of meaning and not so much as a means of expressing specific emotional conflicts as is traditionally asserted by psychoanalysis.