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Poetry, because of its frank verbalization of fantasy, has been valued as the most desirable of sublimated material for psychological studies of an artist's personality.
In Poetry As An Oral Outlet,1 Brill views poetry as oral autoerotic play, 'a chewing and sucking of nice words and phrases', and refers 'those interested in the actual dynamics of poetry productions in relation to psychoanalysis' to Prescott's, The Poetic Mind.2 This creditable work, as well as the studies of Freud,3 Rank and Sachs4 on the subject, accepts poetry as a sublimation and fails to deal with the process of its production or its functions for the personality as a whole.
It is the aim of the writer to describe the dynamic and economic functions of the production of poetry as it occurred in a woman of twenty-seven, the younger of two sisters, who came for psychoanalytic treatment of her sexual frigidity.
In the transference the patient recreated her tendency in life to seek maternal protection as refuge from the guilty cares of a hateful sexual competition and to defend the fears arising from identification with a damaged sexual rival (sister). Her leading conflict concerned the wish for a child and its frustration by the demands of conscience. Guilt required that a pregnancy, as the object of the competition, must avenge upon her the impulse to destroy the beauty and fertility of a rival.