La dimensión poética en el psicoanálisis

Abstract

In epistemological t e m , that is to say, the way in wich psychoanalysis operates as theory and as science, its "poetic dimension" takes place, but not as the aggregate that has been called "applied psychoanalysis". This is stated by Freud himself when he acknowledges that neither psychiatrists nor neurologists were his masters, but the great play writers, Shakespeare mainly, who exerted their influenced upon him. This influence does not only involve the psychoanalytic structure from a theoretical point of view. Freud takes the libido theory from the German Romanticism and the stream of consciousness from literature (letter from Shiller to Korner, cited by Freud). There is an imaginative power in children, in dreams and in the sublimating role of drive. This is what Winnicot describes as "primary creativity", which involves play, artistic appraisal and the magic of a "creative and imaginative life". From this point of view, the psychoanalytical treatment of patients turns them into singular individuals, who become at the same time "part authors and part actors on the stage of life", as Roustang playfully asserts.