Imagery and the Self in Artistic Creativity and Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism*

The artist's imagery provides one of the essential bases on which psychoanalytic literary criticism rests. His use of imagery cuts two ways: on the one hand, the poet is able to formulate new integrations and meanings through the use of poetic metaphor, paradox, and other structures; on the other, he is able to draw upon his own unconscious and express it metaphorically.* Images can thus be likened to a ladder that reaches up into the artist's imagination and down into his unconscious. Or perhaps the artist's use of imagery is like a signpost at a crossroads: on the same post are arrows pointing in the direction of varied social and universal meanings, and others pointing down the road of individual psychobiography or of various unconscious meanings. Neither of these similes, however, conveys the relationship of the unconscious meanings of imagery to the more universal ones at the core of the artistic endeavor. And however one analogizes this process, it is incumbent upon the psychoanalytic critic to synthesize these two uses of imagery in any given work. To the extent that he ignores this problem, more often than not he proceeds into the dead end of reductionism—the bane of psychoanalytic literary criticism.