Psychopoetic Encounters: Figurations of Difficulty

Abstract

While going through some cultural expressions in texts and images, this article proposes reflections on ways in which the practice of poetics, in the sense of creative making, needs to encounter, address, and overcome difficulty in order to facilitate the contribution of the imagination and the acts of “imaging” it allows, to the figuration of the new. Encounter is the key word, indicating plurality and process. Nothing is fixed; hence, not “identity” as something permanent, but instead, in the encounter, identification with others, other fields, other ideas, other images becomes appealing and possible. In the painstaking attempts to think up new ideas, one encounters difficulty, which needs to be overcome. Only through encounters this becomes thinkable, and that makes imaging something so far unheard of, possible. The ‘poetic’ side of psychopoetics, making through (as traversing) and with (as its material) the reflections emanating from the unconscious as they appear at the edge of consciousness, is what binds together the different disciplines as we know them, in a knot of creativity, imagining, and thinking what we did not know.