Psychology, Literature, and the Arts Homepage 

---

Email us at:
vlscher@voicenet.com

Click webauthors for brief bios of Schermer and Graves

Click here to read a sample of Michael's Poems

Introduction and Welcome! This site is dedicated to and intended to be used by all who are interested in the psychological aspects of literature and the arts, whether avid readers, moviegoers, practitioners, or scholars in a particular field such as psychology or filmography, dance, etc.The openness and ecumenicism of our site is comparable to the dialogues which occur in James Joyce’s Ulysses where the teacher Stephen Daedalus converses with "stately plump Buck Mulligan", as well as with the man-about-town Leopold Bloom, who in turn talks wiith J.J. O’Molloy, Molly Bloom, professor McHugh, Mr. O’Madden Burke, and a host of other diverse personalities on one particular Dublin day (Anyone who has attended a “Bloomsday Festival” knows that this is not only possible in real life but fascinating!) Besides, it is often helpful and exciting for, say movie directors, actors, writers, etc. to dialogue with their audience, and so forth.

Specific purpose and guiding principle. Psychological aspects of literary and artistic creations are complex and diverse. Most commonly, audiences, creators, and performers alike wonder about the motives and dynamics of the characters in say, a film or drama, or the “voice”, i.e. speaker of a poem or a novel. But one is also interested in the poets, writers, musicians, choreographers, and artists themselves: What is their purpose, whence comes their style, what is the force that propels their work? A classic example of the latter type of analysis is Freud’s famous and controvertial study, Leonardo Da Vinci, where he suggests that Leonardo's homoerotic impulses related to early experiences with his mother propelled his work. So-- we open the door to many and varied and perhaps sometimes controversial contributions to this page.

Also included will be brief, relevant samples of creative productions themselves, such as a poem, or an excerpt from or summary of a larger work. The purpose of such will be specifically to promote discussion of the psychological aspects, and some key questions for discussion will be included with the work.

Input from visitors to this site. You can and are encouraged to submit your views! Currently, we must limit viewers’ contributions to this page to at most one to a few paragraphs or two-three "pages" of text. You can send your text on an email message to vlscher@voicenet.com Whether it be a brief observation about a movie you attended, or a summary of a scholarly work you have written or one that you recommend (with citations if possible), or a Web link you would suggest, we will add it to this site if appropriate.

We welcome contributions from all countries of the globe. If you speak a language other than English, try to include an English translation along with your native tongue. If we receive items not translated to English, we will do the best we can to have it translated! (We regret that at this time this page cannot be entirely multi-lingual with appropriate translations.)

Questions for Viewers of "Psychology, Literature, and the Arts".

1) The recent film The English Patient has generated a huge amount of interest. "At the story’s passionate core is a six-year affair between Hungarian Count Laszlo Almásy (Ralph Fiennes) and married Brit Katharine Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas). On a 1938 cartography expedition, Laszlo meets Katharine while mapping the North African desert on behalf of the English government. Katharine’s husband (Colin Firth, of Pride and Prejudice) separates from the group, and early sparks of erotic fascination-- hinted at nicely by the actors-- take fire. ( Remington Dahl, The Remington Review )"

We wonder about the two protagonists of this film. Are they real, flesh and blood characters we can recognize and identified with, or are they rather superficially portrayed, so that excitement but not depth is the result? What motivates them? At times they seem almost totally driven by selfish desire intruding over their socially expectable roles, but nothing more. Do they show deeper inner motivations? What is the significance of the cave drawings for these two? For those who have read the book and seen the film, does the film do justice to the book? What do you think the author was trying to say about these two people caught in an extreme and disturbing situation.

2) Which poets and poems do you think best portray the psychology and concerns of women today? For example, do you think that Emily Dickinson was an advocate for women's rights and needs in her poems?

3) Do you feel that the avowed anti-semitism in some of T.S. Eliot’s poems, essays, and lectures is more a tragic flaw in an otherwise well-motivated person of contradictions (and therefore perhaps forgivable) or an abhorrent expression of virulent prejudice which may even cast doubt on the whole corpus of his work?

4) Which movies, books, plays, etc. best convey the emotional and personal impact of severe psychological trauma such as have happened to Holocaust survivors (and their children), physical, sexual, and child abuse victims, or people who suffer severe illnesses or injuries? Write to us about a major artistic or literary figure such as Picasso, or James Wright, or Edward Albee or Adrienne Rich- or whomever- and how their character and inner selves may relate to their work.

Excerpt from: The Wounded Male Persona and the Mysterious Feminine in the Poetry of James Wright: A Study in the Transformation of the Self

by Michael Graves and Victor L. Schermer

To start our dialogue, we thought we would include the introductory section of an article we wrote which has been accepted for publication by The Psychoanalytic Review. It is based on some ideas from "object relations theory" and "self psychology".We welcome your comments. (Email us at vlscher@voicenet.com with your comments and/or a request for a copy of the draft.) James Wright is one of our favorite poets, and we have been discussing the psychological aspects of his work for some time now.

Abstract. The work of the modern American poet, James Wright, is viewed from an object relations/ self psychological perspective. Two key personae in Wright's poems are an abandoned male and a mysterious female. The male is in a state of rejection, abasement, and despair and seeks an object relation with the mysterious feminine to facilitate healing and creativity . The female figure serves as a "transformational object" leading to metamorphosis of the self. She serves as a selfobject, container, and symbiotic mother facilitating movement from the paranoid-schizoid into the depressive position. Some relevant aspects of Wright's life are discussed, including the possibility of psychic trauma which may have contributed to his self-avowed mental illness.

"Every poem is a confession in the sense that it is impossible to write a word on the page without revealing some personal feeling."- James Wright (1973, p.296)

"Last night I paused at the edge of darkness, And slept with the green dew, alone. I have come a long way, to surrender my shadow To the shadow of a horse."- James Wright, "Sitting in a Small Screenhouse on a Summer Morning" (ATR, p.4)

(ATR refers to Wright, J. (1990) Above the River: The Complete Poems, Wesleyan University Press Edition, Farrar Strauss and Giroux and University Press of New England. We heartily recommend this book, edited posthumously by James' wife, Anne Wright, to anyone interested in modern verse. A complete list of references, including those to the citations below, is available on request.

Freud (cf. Gay, 1988, pp. 317-318) remarked that, in their creative sublimations, artists and writers often display insights into the unconscious, rivalling and at times surpassing the psychoanalyst in their prescience. Modern poetry, influenced directly or indirectly by the "stream of consciousness" technique, the "interior monologue," the surrealist emphasis on madness and automatic writing, the abundant use of imagery and myth, and the free verse idiom itself, represents a striking expression of early childhood dilemmas, primitive unconscious mentation, and universal psychological themes. The work of James Wright (1927-1980), an American poet highly regarded as one who achieved a "ceremonial range" of expression of the deepest human concerns (cf. Graves, 1983; Stitt and Graziano, 1990; Cuddihy, 1977), especially contains depth soundings into the unconscious through the exploration of states of the self (cf. Kohut, 1971, 1977) and the use of imagery and language highly suggestive of primitive phantasy and the world of internal objects (Freud (1900, 1917); Melanie Klein (1977a, b); Segal (1980, pp. 61-62)). Wright's work embodies a rich synthesis of diverse influences: lyricism, existential themes, the relationship between Man and Nature, the tradition of the "pure, clear word" (Wright, 1980), and as shall be developed in what follows, the metamorphosis and transformation of the self.

Though Wright certainly could not be considered a self-consciously "biographical" or "psychological" poet, he was quite interested in Freud (Wright, 1975a), and the themes and images of his poems derive from deep, hidden parts of the psyche and reveal something about the inner self. Wright (1975b), asked how he constructed the poems of Shall We Gather at the River (ATR, PP. 147-176), said that they were "carefully dreamed," implying that they evolved from spontaneous images into structures that possess coherence and universal meaning. Like dreams, Wright's poems embody a fundamental principle of psychic life, namely the internalization of object relations to form an inner set of interacting subselves analagous to the characters of a play. According to Guntrip (1961, p. 138): "Freud... accurately represents the human psyche as the kind of entity that carries on its own internal development by differentiating itself into a number of dramatis personae. Thus it maintains its own inner life in the personal form of a mental reproduction of its outer life as it feels and experiences. The one person functions actually as a group of persons (italics ours)..."

The dramatis personae - not to mention the elements of nature and the animal world, the various places of events, and the symbolic images- of Wright's poems often represent aspects of the poet's self, and this tendency is reinforced by the use of images that do not represent real world events but rather signify inner realities, as in these somber surrealistic lines: "Flashlights drift over dark trees,/ Girls kneel,/ An owls eyelids fall" ("Rain," ATR, p. 141).

A persona in Wright's poems, identified alternatively as the speaker of the poem, one of its characters, or a synecdochal image (in which part stands for whole), is a male figure who is utterly abandoned, destitute, hopeless, and suicidal. This figure is paradoxical in that he also represents the "ideal" state of the poet: "blind" (interiorized), "invisible" (an observer, a mirror), etc. The reader, initially taken in by the rich imagery of Wright's poems, finds himself alternately attracted and repelled by this character (or more precisely, a set of interrelated characters or subselves) who is an amalgam of mythic symbolism, imagination, and reality. This male persona undergoes multiple transformations, appearing in different guises and moving from states of severe abandonment and abasement to those of reparation and ecstasy.

Complementary to this figure is one which Robert Bly, Wright's close friend and colleague, highlighted in an essay (1988) entitled "James Wright and the Mysterious Woman". Bly asserted that Wright's work represented the return of the feminine to American culture. The "mysterious woman" is a female goddess who is for Wright a concatenation of his mother, his past lover, "Jennie," his "Muse," and his second wife, Annie, who occupies a central place in Wright's later poems. The mysterious woman also appears occasionally as the speaker of the poem and often as aspects of the natural world- the earth, the moon, light, darkness, etc. Sometimes, she is evoked quite directly, as for example in the following lines:

Between trees, a slender woman lifts up the lovely shadow/ Of her face, and now she steps into the air, now she is gone Wholly into the air. ("Beginning," ATR, p. 135)

Two aspects of Bly's essay are important for our focus. First, Bly's portrayal of Wright's mysterious woman seems overidealized. Bly welcomed her as a transcendent, healing figure related to Venus, the goddess of love (Bly, 1988, p. 74). Yet it is clear that Wright did not hesitate to explore the dark and horrific sides of the feminine, aspects embodied in figures such as Kali, the Hindu Goddess of destruction, for example. Secondly, Bly neglected exploration of a concern more recently dear to his own heart- the position of the male in modern (and post-modern) life. Wright's male personae embody many of the dilemmas articulated by Bly (1992) in his popular polemic on maleness in modern society, Iron John. Bly, for example, emphasizes that the absence from the home of the working father has led to a lack of intimacy between father and son. Wright's distant (though admiring) relation to his father, who sacrificed himself to life as a factory worker in Ohio, and who appears almost as a stranger in the several poems about him (for example, Wright, ATR, p. 168), is a quintessential instance of Bly's argument. However, Wright's expressions are no mere sociological formulations: his depictions of the male and female components of the personality are as complex as human experience itself.

In what follows, we will explore the male persona and the mysterious feminine of Wright from a contemporary psychoanalytic standpoint. Although aspects of Wright's life, for example his childhood in Martins Ferry, Ohio and his later alcoholism and episodes of mental illness (cf. Hall, D., Introduction: Lament for a Maker in ATR, pp. xxxi-xxxii) certainly play a role in his poems, Freud (1910, p.130) correctly warned us about the risks of trying to psychoanalyze the creator on the basis of his or her creations and the usually sparse restrospective data we have about his or her past. Instead, our primary aim is to try to enrich the understanding of Wright's poetry by pointing to an underlying psychological structure which informs it. We readily admit, in keeping with the recent vogue of "intersubjectivity" within psychoanalysis (Stolorow, Atwood, and Brandchaft, 1994), that such a structure is partly a projection of the psychologist's or critic's own experience and imagination, but its virtue may lie in its ability to show certain patterns and consistencies in the poems themselves, and, like a good psychoanalytic interpretation, create the desire and point the direction to further pursue the riches of the depths. The thesis we will develop is that the relationship between male and female in Wright's poetry is that of the poet to his "transformational object" (Bollas, 1987, pp. 13-29), a relationship which emerges ontogenetically in the context of the symbiotic mother-infant dyad (Mahler, Pine, and Bergman, 1975).

As Bollas (loc. cit.) points out, the symbiotic mother's purpose is not only to fulfill or frustrate desire, but also to provide an ever-changing and attuned context in which the infant experiences changes in her ministrations not so much as alterations in the environment as shifts in the state of the self. The male personae in Wright's poems appear to seek and undergo metamorphoses related to a maternal context or a female love object. Often, but not always, the maternal context is the natural world. For Wright, there is also an equation of the mysterious feminine and his "Muse," i.e., his inspiration. In the course of our discussions, it should become apparent to the reader that, in general, artistic and literary inspiration is partly the result of an inner change resulting from "contact" with such a transformational object.

Wright's poetry has many examples of transformations and metamorphoses in the subject via the object, and in many places the self-other distinction tends to blur, as the poet develops an "inner landscape" (Wright, 1973) which is in many respects like a dream. Although such a process may be regarded as regressive, "borderline" or even psychotic, Wright transforms it into art. The "mysterious feminine" element in Wright's poetry acts as an object and context which evokes and provokes changes in the sense of self of the speaker of the poem and in the metier and artistic strivings of the poet himself. For instance, in a poem entitled "Mary Bly" (ATR, pp. 141-142), about Robert and Carol Bly's then newborn daughter, Wright says ecstatically: "...her delicate hands weave back and forth./I feel the seasons changing beneath me..." Here, the birth and presence of the child (mysterious feminine) evokes inner changes of mood ("seasons") within the poet as a type of parallel process to the motion of the child's hands. Such oscillation between subject and object occurs frequently enough in Wright's poems to become an aspect of his style or idiom (Bollas, 1989, pp. 9-10).

In developing an understanding of the theme of transformation, the authors turn to various notions within the contemporary psychoanalytic spectrum. For example, in touching upon the ways in which Wright's abandoned male struggles with persecutory elements and efforts to integrate positive and negative internal states, we draw upon Melanie Klein's (1977a and b) formulations of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. We see a place for Kohut's (1971) insights into self cohesion and "mirroring" in understanding the poet's search for self and wholeness. And Bion's views on transformation (1965) and on the relationship of "container and contained" (1962) are useful in grasping the role of the mysterious feminine as a vessel for healing the unintegrated aspects of the poet's self. It can be said that Wright explores poetically the relationship between a self struggling to find and sustain an identity- sometimes at the very edge of abandonment, fragmentation, and annihilation- in relation to the world of inner objects which sometimes nurture, sometimes haunt, and often threaten the fabric of the self and its tenuous cohesion. Thus, object relations theory and self psychology provide useful and complementary perspectives (cf. Grotstein (1982); Bacal and Newman (1990)) on the depth psychological aspects of a poet such as Wright.

The figure in Wright's poems who needs healing and transformation is a man who is abandoned, rejected, abased. He is in this respect a scapegoat, a victim, and he seeks others with whom to unite in order to repair the damaged self and to ignite his creative potential. According to Perera (1986, p.29), "Finding ... expressive channels is a necessity for those identified with demonic energies, as scapegoated individuals are. The creative form provides a vessel for the containment and taming of these energies." Further, the victim identifies with "the dying and reborn god, originally the consort of the loathesome and beautiful Great Goddess, who grants sovereignty in Vedic, Middle Eastern, African and European mythologies" (loc. cit., p. 77). The mysterious woman in Wright's poems is a descendant of such a goddess-figure who becomes the transformational source of healing and reparation in the poet...

About Vic Schermer and Michael Graves.

Vic Schermer is a psychologist in private practice and clinic settings in Philadelphia, PA. He is author of Object Relations, the Self, and the Group and Ring of Fire, both published by Routledge. He is Director of the Study Group for Contemporary Psychoanalytic Process and The Institute for the Study of Human Conflict.

Michael Graves is a poet, critic, and teacher in New York City. His publications include Outside St. Jude's, a collection of poems published by REM press, and poems and essays in such journals as Hollins Critic and The James Joyce Quarterly. He directs the Phoenix Reading Series in New York.