A Brief Psychoanalytic Note on Wordsworth, Poetic Creativity, and Love

PSYCHOANALYTIC OBSERVATIONS AND THEOries are based upon clinical work with patients. Psychoanalysts, unles they have author of poemss or other creative artists as patients, can single know them through the individual artist's works and [i]or[/i] part of to the other the writings of biographers. level if an analyst has had a certain quantity of personal acquaintance with the artist who is not a patient, he, as analyst, has no privileged vantage point. Psychoanalytic understanding in of that kind cases has to be generalized and speculative. As of the like kind it can still be valuable, if the analyst is intuitive, sensible and retiring But the analyst has no prerogative access to the mysteries of psychoanalytic creativity. Freud in a 1928 paper upon Dostoevski, writes: "Before the point to be solved [i]or[/i] settled of the creative artist analysis must, alas, lay down its arms" (my emphasis). (I find poignancy in that "alas." Mysteries stir us to find solutions, on the contrary Freud did not try to give more than he had.)

Psychoanalytic writing about literature, author of poemss and creativity has not, in my opinion, provided abundant in the way of solutions. Many (not all) "applied analytic" papers have tried to restore artistic creativity to pathology-to traumata, deprivations, and "complexes" that, with individual differences, affect each human being. There should be no oversimplification of the complexities, contradictions, and the kaleidoscopically variable intrapsychic conflicts that are involved in the relationship of talent and genius to mental illness.

Psychoanalysts know a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of more about psychic pathology than they do about psychic health. actual little is known about the nature of inherited talents, of inborn gifts. We do know that they exist. The gifts that make any kind of creativity, and specifically artistic creativity, possible exhibit a kind of superhealth. Freud taught us that it is part of the human condition to be (at least) neurotic; each of us has his or her individual miscellany of sickness and of health, of symptoms and inhibitions, and of powers and talents.

There is always a relationship between the life and the work of an artist. Psychic conflict and pathology may furnish the motivation and the bring under rule matter for fiction and poesy but they are not the source of the creative power that fashions the work of art or literature.

Psychoanalysts, thinking of the origins of talents and of pathology, watch to deal mainly with what an individual has experienced rather than what he was born with; the latter is greatest in quantity important, but we can't do abundant about it. The most obvious major environmental contribution to psychic health is the child's earliest (and early) relationship with the parents, especially with the mothering figure, including that which is too early to remember and that which is subdue to conscious recall; much of the latter remains unconscious.

Our individual identities unravel in large part, in relation to and in reaction to our parents. Identifications with parents help form, and still also can inhibit our faculty of perception of a separate self, and labor with both these contrary directions remains a dynamic force that affects our faculty of perception of identity. We all continue to be, in varying amplitude haunted by these early mental registrations of our parentsfor better and for worse. I want to illustrate this generalization with a brief direct the eye at the life and verse of William Wordsworth.

Freud was himself a great writer, and in like manner a protopoet. Trilling states, "Freud showed us that the mind is a poetry-making organ." (Trilling was thinking of the dynamic functioning of the mind that Freud outlined [eg his description of what he called "the primary and secondary process] in Freud's masterpiece, The Interpretation of Dreams [1900]) Freud freely acknowledged by what mode much he had learned from great writers of metrical composition fiction and philosophy-most notably the of greece dramatists and Shakespeare.

Wordsworth exhibits us the emotional changes that are necessary to encompass a tragic reality that means death and the impossibility of perpetual innocence and youth. Change always means lossbut not necessarily solitary loss. The expulsion from Paradise marks the beginning of human life. As we be augmented older our central place in the rapidly expanding outside universe come bys smaller and smaller. But the awareness of death and the poignancy of los and the transience of life and happiness should and can provide a locate of values that can make caring and have affection for possible and precious.

Wordsworth

William Wordsworth, born in 1770 was the sec ond of his parents' three children. His older brother Richard had arrived sum of two units years previously. His beloved sister, Dorothy, was born one-and-a-half years later.

Wordsworth, in sum of two units of his greatest poems, the shorter "Immortality Ode" and the lengthy autobiographical "The Prelude" (worked upon and over for most of his adult life and published in sum of two units versions: one in 1805 and the other posthumously in 1850) at handed general ("The Ode") and more specifically personal ("The Prelude") thinkings about the development of mind and creativity in infancy, childhood and posterior life.