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And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
Comparisons between poetry and pathology can lead to a most uneasy alliance. Where, for example, does one draw the line between a symptom and an aesthetic convention, or between a symptom and a poetic expansion of ordinary reality? And if a poet uses certain modes of response that resemble neurotic symptoms, but transmutes them into something else in the course of the poem, how does he effect such a transformation? Not least of all, how do we as readers judge whether the poet has merely duplicated a pathological response, perhaps disguising it with alluring turns of phrase, or whether he has indeed shaped his illness into art?
Promising beginnings have been made along the lines of the foregoing questions, particularly in regard to the relationship between poetic language and the language of schizophrenics,1 and in regard to an analogous problem in the visual arts—e.g., the distinctions between an artist's use of blank space as part of his pictorial content and the schizophrenic tendency to “see” nonexistent objects.2 In this paper, I shall consider the similarities and distinctions between the pathological concept of “omnipotence of thought” and certain aspects of the poetic imagination.
The problem has been surprisingly neglected despite Freud's recognition that omnipotence of thought, which he defines as an “over-accentuation