Self-cohesion and the Poetic Experience
Specifically, Richards’s concern is with an ascending scientific culture that dismisses poetic statements as invalid, as they do not correspond to any measurable facts and so can contribute nothing substantively meaningful to our knowledge of the world or human experience. In defence of poetic truth and the pre-eminence of the emotions, Richards’s description of the poetic experience has meaning for a therapeutic process in which the language of metaphor seems to correlate strongly with increased and predominantly right brain activity associated with positive feelings of self and self-other relatedness. If the nurturing of these primarily imagistic-affective centres of the brain is indeed the work of a reciprocally nurtured non-linear language of feeling, then poetry’s ‘pseudo-statements’ may have real-world value in the treatment of relationally traumatised patients by promoting self cohesion and the capacity to relate more adaptively.
