Metropolis

by Sandro D. Fossemò

(Translation of Rossella Cirigliano)

"There are things you know about,

and things you don’t, the known and the unknown,

and in between are the doors—that’s us."

(Jim Morrison)

        For a long time psychoanalysis has found out that in a conflicting but creative way there can be a psychological link between a “gifted perception” and a “mental dissociation” in the artist who in his neurosis suffers from perception problems. On the contrary, the mechanistic conception of positivistic psychiatry has labelled “abnormality” as “mental illness”, thus denying the creative aspects so deeply connected to the perception field. Exactly like it occurs to the oyster that, thanks to a slight flaw in its shell, let a grain of sand inside to produce a pearl, for those who have a perception problem their pearl is their art.

Jungian psychoanalysis in particular applies to a study that connects the unconscious to the neurotic and genial expression of the dreamer, where perception is directly influenced by the archetype.

Even though I do not intend to analyse the complex and genial mind of the well-known poet, I can try to imagine a psychological path, only intuitive and poetical, of his remarkable artistic creativity and state undoubtedly that the most brilliant minds are often the most sensible and,  in a sense, the most ‘wrecked’ because of a peculiar perception of reality aiming at going beyond the common one, in order to examine the ‘hidden’ one.

Poe, in Marginalia, writes about perception: 

-That intuitive and seemingly casual perception by which we often attain knowledge, when reason herself falters and abandons the effort, appears to resemble the sudden glancing at a star, by which we see it more clearly than by a direct glaze; or the half-closing the eyes in looking at a plot of grass, the more fully to appreciate the intensity of its green.-

Besides, I also consider the most part of Freud psychoanalysis unreliable, so I do not agree at all with Maria Bonaparte (1882-1962)’s absurd interpretations. I also believe it is wrong and deterministic to go back to the author’s psyche merely starting from a critical analysis of his works, or analysing the dream expression just as an unconscious revelation of the ‘repressed’. We can never be sure of the psychoanalytical solutions for the complicated human psyche, in particular if it is gifted. Before analysing the visionary experiences, we have to stress that Poe was on drugs, such as the laudanum, which certainly changed his predisposition to mental dissociation 1 to an enhanced perception of reality, able to release those very symbolic contents of the unconscious in Poe’s fiction. It is obvious that those drugs only helped his creativity but did not cause it.

Meta-symbolic art

If the artist, like psychoanalysis asserts, through imagination can simulate the dream and become an interpreter of the unconscious, he can observe and amplify the dream hemisphere of reality through its perception. The dream intertwined with reality becomes a means to examine and reveal the riddles of reality.

If we live inside a dream but we are not aware of it for our limited perception, then we can go beyond our perceptive limit through a surreal art. In Poe’s art the dream changes into a symbolic language, aiming at showing the soul metaphysical delirium in a ‘meta-symbolic’ synthesis coming from the archetype of the collective unconscious. Thus, Poe’s art becomes a meta-symbolic one that creates the mythopoeic imagination that unconsciously reveals itself in reality. If myths reveal our real hidden identity, it is obvious that the archetypical imagination living and reigning inside us is not only a means to get to know ourselves, but also it is above all a perceptive key to understand the world. 

Dream and art are linked to the myth universe and much less to that of the repressed, but if psychoanalysis considers art as an action of balance between the needs of the unconscious and conscious world, then we can consider mythopoeic expression as a human desire to go back to the primitive as a reaction to a morally and rationally repressive reality. So myths are a kind of primordial forces which unconsciously take part in the artistic expression, just like it used to happen with gods in ancient Greece.

An example is the story The Devil in the Belfry where a mysterious character, through a clock deception, puzzles a functional and mechanistic society.

That obscure and demonic destroyer that acts against a ‘perfect system’ can be seen as god Pan grappling with an inhuman technicist world. Jungian psychoanalyst James Hillman (1926-2011) explains imagination and world above all on the mythological point of view, where archetypes organize our imaginary and dream activity. It is limited and also inappropriate to consider art as the expression of a dimension between an oppressive reality and a consequent imagination that satisfy and compensate our deep desires.

Art can also be a metaphysical projection of myths into reality, through a meta-symbolic expression, where reality is transcended to leave room for a dream imagination of the ‘ancient’ or ‘ancestral’, represented by the very archetype.

Dream is Death

     Death is depicted by Poe as a psychological nightmare, where reality melts into dream in the mental dissociation of the main character who, immersed in a timeless labyrinth, acts with lucid insanity, according to a diabolic plan of death. Soul and death are madly and rationally intertwined in the nightmare. The deeper we are in the soul abyss, the clearer we catch sight of death, as Hillman states: Dream is Soul and Soul is Death.2 The link between dream and death dates back to the primitives, for whom the dream world was the death world. Such concept is also in Hillman’s psychoanalysis, which definitely rejects the Freudian or Jungian idea of unconscious as an expression of day repressions, and in dreams only sees Ades, the realm of the dead, the ‘underworld’, ruled by gods and myths of Ancient Greece. In my opinion, Poe’s art suits that mythological imagination suggested by Hillman with his “Old Age Psychology”, in which dreams emerge from that realm of the dead where soul dwells. In the short story Ligeia, for example, at night the main character sees a shadow behind the glare of an incense burner almost to show the soul wandering in the realm of the dead. In fact in Poe’s dream universe the ancestral myth often lingers as a symbolic call of death where the “dread of soul” develops.

The visionary

For Poe he who daydreams develops a lot of creativity and can understand the complexity of reality at the price of a visionary dissociation state, aiming at expressing a “supreme form of intelligence”. Mental alteration states are a means to develop creativity, for they allow the unconscious to emerge frenetically in the perceptive field. 

The secret of genial perception consists in the interpenetration between dream and reality, determined by altered mental states caused by psychological traumas, where dissociation from reality occurs.

C.G. Jung (1875-1961) brilliantly analyses the event when a person loses any awareness of reality to leave space for the unconscious. 

 -The forces erupted from collective psyche bring confusion and mental blindness. A consequence of the dissolution of persona is that imagination gets loose, that is what collective psyche does. This break-in of fantastic elements violently spread in the conscience materials and impulses whose existence nobody had any doubts. All the treasures of thought and mythological feeling are found out. It is not always easy to resist such overwhelming sensations. This phase is listed among those representing a real danger during analysis, danger not to be underestimated. It is easy to understand that this condition is so unbearable that man wants to end it as soon as possible, as its resemblance with mental alienation is that strong. The most common form of madness, early dementia or schizophrenia, basically consists in the fact that the unconscious expels and replaces the functions of the conscious mind. The unconscious seizes the functions of reality and substitutes them with a reality of its own. Unconscious thoughts are audible as voices, or are perceived as illusions or body hallucinations. They show themselves as senseless yet unmovable decisions, made in opposition to reality.

As persona dissolves in collective psyche, the unconscious is similarly yet not identically driven into conscience. The only difference from the mental alienation state is that the unconscious is brought on the surface through conscious analysis; at least this is what happens to the principle of analysis, when strong cultural resistances are still to be overcome. Then, after overthrowing the barriers set up for years, the unconscious spontaneously intrudes upon conscience and sometimes burst into the mind like a torrent. In this phase resemblance with mental alienation is very strong. But it would be about real madness only if unconscious contents became a reality which replaced conscious reality; in other words, if the subject gave credence to them. - 3 (Italics is mine)

 Only a mind as well prepared as Poe’s is ready to receive unconscious invasions without giving in completely to mental alienation, because the writer can brilliantly use perceptive dysfunction as a cognitive means of reality through the rational analysis of his own imagination.  As a consequence, Poe is not a schizophrenic, who has completely lost the sense of reality but an intense visionary, talented and able to consciously control his own visions. Jungian analysis about dissociation from reality with peculiar visions is confirmed when the writer describes his mental state when he “day-dreams” in the essay Marginalia, making imprecise reference to some sudden “fancies”.4

-There is, however, a class of fancies, of exquisite delicacy, which are not thoughts, and to which, as yet, I have found it absolutely impossible to adapt language. I use the word fancies at random, and merely because I must use some word; but the idea commonly attached to the term is not even remotely applicable to the shadows of shadows in question. They seem to me rather psychal than intellectual. They arise in the soul (alas, how rarely!) only at its epochs of most intense tranquillity-when the bodily and mental health are in perfection-and at those mere points of time where the confines of the waking world blend with those of the world of dreams. I am aware of these "fancies" only when I am upon the very brink of sleep, with the consciousness that I am so. I have satisfied myself that this condition exists but for an inappreciable point of time-yet it is crowded with these "shadows of shadows"; and for absolute thought there is demanded time's endurance.