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Seamus Heaney and Tomas Tranströmer are two artists who have both been awarded the Nobel Prize for the grace of their expression and the beauty and originality of their work. In placing several of their poems side by side, I wish to think about their varied conceptions of access to interior space, the creative process, and the mind of the writer. Each seems to work with a tacit topographic conception of how the unconscious is held, and how it can be accessed.
In Sigmund Freud's work, topography became a metaphor for how the unconscious and conscious relate to each other. In his early metapsychological papers, “the unconscious” was used to describe both any repressed material and the psychic process by which things became unknown to the self. This resulted in both a descriptive and a dynamic unconscious. These definitions moved with some fluidity until Freud (1923) shifted from his topographic model to a structural one of id, ego and super-ego. Long after Freud's shift, the metaphor of surface and depth remains in the culture and common language. It lives in such phrases as “digging deep,” “still waters run deep,” and “unearthing the truth.” Freud's early topography probably grew out of what was already a “conceptual metaphor” in Freud's time (Lakoff & Johnson, 2003).
Heaney and Tranströmer create images of psychic space in contrasting ways both through metaphor and through the structure of their poems. In Heaney's work, the penetration of boundaries appears as a method for accessing the unconscious and the true self. For Tranströmer, psychic space may be generated more by juxtaposition and infusion across membranes. Looking at several of their poems, I wish to consider their