Culture is Memory, Memory is Culture

In the 130 years since Sigmund Freud first published his psychoanalytic writings, psychoanalysis has clearly emerged as a worldwide cultural force, defined by interdisciplinary cultural knowledge.

Sigmund Freud: “Not I, but the poets, discovered the unconscious.” “The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious. What I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.” The Hebrew Physician/Harofe Haivre, The Thirteenth Year, edited by Moses Einhorn, dedicated to Sigmund Freud, Volume One, /1940, pp. 161–176, reported by Phillip R. Lehrman, “Freud's Contributions to Science”, Freud in conversation.

Freud meant the dramatic poets—Goethe, Shakespeare, Sophocles, who wrote “Oedipus Rex”, those who wrote about the great passions of life. Sophocles, like all the ancient Greek dramatic playwrights of his time, wrote all his plays in poetic form. The dialogue was written in iambic trimeter, the chorus in choral lyric meter, usually dactylic trimeter or hexameter.

“In a very real sense, Freud joined to the probing eye of the scientist the creating eye of the poet.”

Trilling has said that writers are preoccupied with reality. In contrast, in “Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's ‘Gradiva’ ”, S.E. 9.8, 1907, Freud said that art is pure pleasure principle. He said, “Creative writers are

valuable allies, and their evidence is to be prized highly, for they are apt to know a whole host of things between heaven and earth which our philosophy has not yet let us dream.“

Muriel Rukeyser, in The Life of Poetry 1949, reprinted 1996, Paris Press, Amherst, Mass., speaks not only of poetry, but of the arts in general: “The universe of poetry is the universe of emotional truth. Our material is the way we feel and the way we remember.” (p. 23).

“Our experience, set in our time in the world, may be shared through any art. We are ready for pictures of our true life; we are ready for the po