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Thymophor in dreams, poetry, art and memory:
Emotion translated into imagery as a basic element of human creativity
Ernest Hartmann MD
Professor of Psychiatry, Tufts University School of Medicine
Keywords: dream, dreaming, poetry, art, memory, thymophor
Contact Ernest Hartmann MD
27 Clark Street, Newton, MA 02459
ehdream@aol.com
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Abs: The word thymophor (from thymo: emotion and phor: carrying over) is
introduced here. It refers to the carrying-over, or translation, of emotion into
imagery, which we find is an important element in human creativity. This paper
starts with dreaming: my collaborators and I have studied the Central Image (CI) of
the dream over many years, and shown that the CI is driven by, and in the simplest
case pictures, the underlying emotion of the dreamer. This is an instance of
thymophor. The center of a poem, which TS Eliot calls the Objective Correlative,
play the same role: it pictures the underlying emotion. We go on to find
thymophor in painting, music, and other arts . Thymophor appears to be a basic
element in our creative activity.
This paper then discusses metaphor, a basic part of human thought,
occurring everywhere, though especially prominently in dreams and poetry. We
find that metaphor is understandable only when emotion is considered: emotion
chooses or drives the metaphor to be used: thus, again, thymophor, a picturemetaphor driven by and carrying the emotion. A brief experiment in
autobiographical memory is presented, suggesting that the moments that leap out in
memory are recalled as imagery, but imagery that is driven by heightened emotion,
once more: thymophor. Finally, an outline of the probable brain biology of
thymophor is discussed.
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Introduction
This paper will discuss a number of approaches to a basic element of human
creativity, the translation of emotion into imagery, which we call “thymophor.”
Much of our experimental work has dealt with dreaming. Though some consider
dreams to be confused nonsense, my collaborators and I have concluded that every
dream is a creative product, and that the dream – especially the central imagery of
the dream -- depends on turning emotion into imagery .+ We can arrive at
thymophor from a number of different starting points.
Starting with the dream
Thus we will start with dreaming. A whole series of our studies on the
nature and functions of dreaming began with the Tidal Wave Dream.
I’m walking along a beach with a friend, I’m not sure who, when suddenly a
huge wave, maybe forty feet high, sweeps us away. I struggle and struggle in
the water. I’m not sure whether I’ll make it to the surface. Then I wake up.
This dream, or something very like it, is common in people who have
recently experienced a trauma of any kind (Barrett 1996, Hartmann 1998,
Hartmann et al, 1998, Hartmann et al., 2001;). I have heard it from victims of rape
or attempted rape, victims of attacks, from people whose close relatives or friends
were killed or attacked, and from people who have barely escaped from a burning
house or car.
My associates and I consider this dream especially important, in fact
paradigmatic, because it lets us see so clearly what is going on. The dream does not
picture the actual traumatic experience – the burning house or the rape. It pictures
the powerful emotion of the dreamer – “I am terrified. I am overwhelmed.” Similar
tidal wave dreams have been reported after many kinds of trauma, for instance after
a devastating fire in Oakland, CA by Siegel (1996). The dream image is not always
literally a tidal wave; we have examples of images such as being swept away by a
whirlwind, or being chased off a cliff by a gang.
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Most dreams of course are not so straightforward. The simple picturing of an
emotional state seems to occur most when there is a single powerful emotion
present, as in someone who has just been traumatized. Terror is perhaps the most
straightforward emotion in these situations, but there are others, which are also
pictured in dreams, for instance vulnerability. Here are some dreams in which
vulnerability appear to be pictured:
I dreamt of a small animal lying in the road bleeding.
Several of us were wandering around on a huge plain. There was no shelter.
There was rain beating down on us. We had no place to go. We were all lost and
helpless.
There were shellfish creatures, like lobsters or crayfish, lying there with their
shells torn off, all white and pink and very exposed.
Guilt, especially survivor guilt, is a very powerful emotion, often pictured in
dreams. For instance, a man who escaped from a burning house, in which a family
member had died, dreamt:
I dreamt of a fire somewhere, in a house very different from our actual house.
In the dream my brother and everyone else escaped, but I was still in the house
getting burned when I woke up.
Sadness or mourning is also frequently portrayed very clearly. Here are
dreams from two different dreamers in the week after their mothers’ deaths.
There was an empty house, empty and barren, the furniture all gone. All the
doors and windows were open and the wind was blowing through.
A huge tree has fallen down right in front of our house. We’re all stunned.
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In all these cases, the dream, and especially the central image of the dream
seems to be picturing, very clearly, the emotions of the dreamer (Hartmann, 1998,
1999, 2011). Sometimes the dream involves a long story, with multiple scenes.
However if there is one powerful image, or a few, these will usually be carrying the
underlying emotion.
All the above of course are only examples, or “anecdotal evidence,”
illustrating rather than demonstrating a point. We then went on to see whether we
could develop actual research evidence for this view of dreams.
We then attempted to study quantitatively the tidal wave image and similar
powerful central images. We first called the image a “Contextualizing Image” (CI)
since it appeared to provide a “picture-context” for the emotion of the dreamer
(Hartmann, 1996; Hartmann et al., 1997; Hartmann et al., 1998). However this term
was found unwieldy and confusing by some, so the image is now called simply the
Central Image, keeping the abbreviation CI. A scoring sheet for the CI has been
developed (figure 1) (Hartmann et al, 1997, Hartmann et al, 1998) which can be
used on any written or recorded dream report. It has now been used in over fifty
different research studies.
Fig 1 About here
The scorer, who knows nothing about the dreamer or the circumstances
surrounding the dream, looks at a dream report and first decides whether or
not there is a scorable Central Image. If there is (this turns out to be the case
in 50 to 60% of dreams scored) the scorer jots down a few words describing
the image, and then scores the intensity of the image on a seven-point scale
(0, 0.5, 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, 2.5, 3.0) based on how powerful, vivid, bizarre and
detailed the image seems. (“0” means no CI and “3” means about as powerful
an image as you have seen in dreams.) The scorer then tries to guess what
emotion or emotions, from a list of emotions provided, might be pictured by
this image.
Central Image Intensity (CII) turns out to be an especially important
measure. Although it is of course a subjective judgment by the scorer, there is
good agreement between scorers -- inter-rater reliability of r = .70 to r = .90
(Hartmann, et al. 1998; Hartmann, et al. 2001, Hartmann, Zborovsky, et al.
2001). We will discuss a number of studies showing that Central Image
Intensity (CII) is related to the power of the underlying emotion.
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Since there are eighteen emotions to choose from, it has been more
difficult to obtain good inter-rater reliability on the individual emotion
pictured by the dream imagery. However there is quite good agreement
between raters when emotions ( fig 1) are grouped into three categories: 1)
fear/terror and helplessness/vulnerability; 2) other negative emotions (#s 310 on rating sheet); 3) all positive emotions (#s 11-18) (Hartmann, et al.
2001).
First we showed that, on a blind basis, CII is rated higher in dreams
that in daydreams ( Hartmann et al., 2001) as expected. We also found, as
expected, that CII is higher in content from REM awakenings than from nonREM awakenings, which in turn score higher than material from waking
periods (Hartmann and Stickgold, 2000). We then went on to look at whether
CII is related to emotion and the power of the dreamer’s emotion.
Several studies looked at “Big dreams” (Jung’s term for powerful dreams
that remain with the dreamer for years). We operationalized “big dreams” in
several ways. In one study we found that CII is rated higher in “dreams that stand
out” than in “recent dreams” from the same persons. (Hartmann et al., 2001)
Likewise CII is scored higher in dreams characterized as “ the earliest dream you
can remember” than in “recent dreams” (Hartmann and Kunzendorf, 2005-2006).
Thus CII appears to be high in dreams that are remembered and are presumably
emotionally important.
In one study, we examined dreams called “important” by the dreamer. A
group of 57 persons each sent us a recent dream they considered “important” and a
dream they considered “unimportant” or less important. CII was significantly
higher in the “important” dreams (Mean for Important dreams 1.19, mean for
Unimportant dreams 0.81. Difference = .38, S.D. 1.048; t = 2.78, p < .007) (Hartmann,
2008).
We also studied one group of “especially significant” dreams. A group of 23
students very interested in their dreams each submitted one “especially significant”
dream in a report by by Dr. Roger Knudson(2001). The mean CII in these 23
dreams was 2.62 (mean of two experienced raters). This is the highest mean CII
score of any group we have seen, much higher that means of recent dreams in
various groups. These students did not supply a “non-significant dream for a direct
comparison. However, comparing these “highly significant” dreams with our largest
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group of recent dreams, from 286 students, we found a highly significant difference:
(Mean for Significant Dreams 2.62, S.D. 0.48; mean for recent dreams 0.75, S.D. 1.03.
t = 16.0, p < .0001) (Hartmann, 2008).
Dreams that were considered “big” in the sense of leading to a scientific or
artistic discovery ( Barrett, 2001) likewise were scored as having unusually high
Central Image Intensity ( Hartmann 2008).
We went on to examine trauma and stress – situations involving strong and
mainly negative emotions. We found that CII is higher in Ss who have suffered a
recent trauma than in those who have not (Hartmann, et al. 1998; Hartmann, et al.
2001). We also found CII to be higher in the recent dreams of students who
checked off on a questionnaire that they had suffered either physical or sexual abuse
at any time, than in students who checked off no abuse (p < .02)(Hartmann, et al.
2001).
Trauma and abuse are difficult to study systematically, since the trauma is
different in each person, and the methods of dream collection differed as well.
Therefore we conducted a more systematic study, using 9/11/01 as a day that we
considered to have been traumatic or at least very stressful for everyone in the
United States. We found a number of people who had been recording all their
remembered dreams for years, and were willing to send us twenty dreams – the last
ten they had recorded before 9/11/01 and the first ten dreams after 9/11. Our first
study involved 320 dreams from 16 subjects before and after 9/11/01. When the
code was broken, we found that the “after” dreams had significantly higher CII than
the “before” dreams (p < .002). Somewhat to our surprise, the “before” and “after”
dreams did not differ on length, “dream-likeness”, “ vividness”, or presence of
towers, airplanes or attacks. CII was the only measure that clearly differentiated the
after dreams vs. the before dreams (Hartmann and Basile, 2003).
Subsequently we expanded the study to 880 dreams from 44 subjects
(Hartmann and Brezler, 2008). Again, in the larger sample, CII was significantly
higher in dreams after 9/11 (p < .001). This confirms our earlier studies finding
higher CII at times of stress or emotional arousal. With the larger N there was now a
slight but significant increase in content involving “attacks”, though there was still
no before vs. after difference on the other measures.
In addition to the finding of increased CI intensity after trauma, abuse, or
after 9/11, there was also a shift in the ratings of “emotion pictured by the CI”
towards the first two emotions on the list (Fear/terror and helplessness/
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vulnerability, which can be called the “nightmare emotions”). This shift was usually
statistically significant, but was not as clear-cut and dramatic as the increase in CII –
probably because of the difficulty in scoring and reaching agreement on the exact
emotion pictured.
This group of studies show that the power of the Central Image of the dream
appears to be related to the strength of the underlying emotion – increasing in
situations of increased emotion. And, after trauma or stress, when the emotions felt
can be presumed to be negative, the negative emotions, especially fear/terror and
helplessness/vulnerability, were rated as being pictured by the Central Image.
We also examined this view of dreams as imagery picturing powerful
emotion in a different way. We suggested that perhaps sleep and REM-sleep, though
the usual place for dreams, were not absolutely necessary. If a dream was made of
imagery driven by powerful emotion, could we introduce these conditions in
waking persons and produce a dream or something like a dream?
In fact this is exactly what we found. Forty-four students in a classroom
setting were each asked to write down four things, in a balanced order, after
appropriate instructions: 1) a recent dream; 2) a recent daydream; 3) a daydream
or reverie allowed to develop right there in class, in a relaxed state, with no other
instruction than to let imagery develop; and 4) a daydream or reverie allowed to
develop in a relaxed state, after they had chosen an emotion that felt close to them
and had been instructed to intensify the emotion, allow it to envelop them and
become as strong as possible. All the written material was examined on a blind
basis, and rated on standardized scales of “dream-likeness” and “bizarreness.”
Results showed that material written under condition 4 (imagery while
experiencing emotion) was rated significantly more dreamlike and more bizarre
than material from conditions 2 and 3, and was rated almost exactly as dreamlike
and bizarre as condition 1, the recent dream (Hartmann and Kunzendorf, 2000;
Hartmann, et al. 2002-2003). Thus the CI paradigm – imagery under intense
emotion – can produce a dream, or very dream-like material, even in the waking
state.
Overall, these quantitative studies convinced us that the CI is driven or
guided by the dreamer’s underlying emotion, and in the clearest cases the CI
straightforwardly pictures the emotion, as in the tidal wave dream.
Recently, Kunzendorf and Veatch (2013) have developed a new way of
approaching the central imagery of the dream. They asked their study participants,
who were digital art students, to picture their dreams digitally. This is an intriguing
way to examine the CI of the dream directly, bypassing the verbal dream report and
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the scorer. They came up with striking images in 100 dreamers, which I believe
were the Central Images of their dreams, though that term was not used. The
authors also studied the importance of underlying emotion in these dreams: they
found that the students could clarify the meaning of their dreams and images by
focusing on the underlying emotion.
In addition to the quantitative studies of CIs, summarized above, we find
that in a rough way we can explain a number of the most common dreams as an
emotional state translated into a clear central dream image ( thymophor). Here are
some emotional states and dreams which may be familiar to the reader
Emotional state: I’m just three (or two, or four) years old. I’ve been pretty
well treated. So far I assumed that I was the center of the world, but now I’m
beginning to notice that the world is actually run by large creatures who are much
more powerful than I am. These creatures act friendly most of the time, but they’re
unpredictable. Once in a while they yell or fight or hurt me or make demands of me
that I can’t understand. It’s scary at times.
Dream: I’m being chased by a big monster (this is the most common dream at
that age).
What is a monster, basically? It‘s a large, powerful, unpredictable creature.
Emotional state: I’m a bit anxious. People think I’m competent, but I’m not
sure. I feel a bit lost. I’m not sure I can manage all this stuff.
Dream: I can’t find the classroom / I haven’t studied / I’ve studied the wrong
subject / I can’t read the exam, etc. (These “typical exam dreams” are among the
most common dreams in adults -- at least in adults who’ve been to school in
developed nations.)
Emotional state: Things are going quite well, in fact: I’m getting married
soon/ starting a new job/ moving to a nice new area. But I’m worried. Others seem
so much more confident. They know what they’re doing but I don’t.
Dream: I’m naked/ half naked/wearing a torn dress/ dressed in rags/ while
other people are more fully and appropriately clothed. (This is another very common
dream in adults.)
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There are some situations that produce a very expectable group of emotions.
For instance, we have gathered many dreams from pregnant women expecting their
first child, though we have not studied the Central Images in a quantitative way. The
most complete series of such dreams, including the examples below, are in an
excellent work by Patricia Maybruck (1989) . Such dreams have also been collected
by Garfield (1988), Van de Castle ( 1994). Many of the dreams picture clear
emotions and emotional concerns, which differ with the stage of pregnancy.
The dominant concerns early in pregnancy generally revolve around “what is
happening to my body?” which includes “will I still be attractive?” and the dreams
reflect this through changes of shape and increases in size of the self and other
objects or animals; the dreams also involve large disfigured creatures. There were
many reports of dreams such as this:
“I was attending some kind of show or concert. I was real fat; I looked like a
blimp. The guys were all laughing and admiring these really cute girls on
stage. No one paid attention to me.”
Later concerns arise about what will this thing, this baby, actually look like
which then leads to innumerable dreams of small and then large creatures sometimes monsters or strange ill-formed things - portraying these concerns of the
dreamer. Here are two such examples:
“I go out the back door of my house and I see, in the neighbor’s yard, their pet
dog with many small black animals. They are a triangular shape, a kind I never
saw before. They are playing with some rats on a little hill of dust.”
“There, sitting between my legs, was this naked little boy... his face was like an
old
man’s and there were fangs coming out of his lips."
And towards the end of the pregnancy, the woman’s primary concern
becomes whether or not she’ll be able to handle motherhood, and child-rearing.
Here are some of these dreams:
“Our apartment was invaded with mice, lizards, rabbits, kittens, puppies. They
were coming in the windows and front door. I couldn’t stop them and they
were messing up everything.”
“Someone left a box full of baby chicks on our doorstep. I was busy and they
died before I had time to take care of them.”
These dreams clearly picture the woman’s concerns that she'll be
overwhelmed and be unable to care properly for her child.
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My impression from reading many such series of dreams during pregnancy is
that these very clear emotion-picturing dreams are found especially in first
pregnancies, in stable young women who are basically happy to be pregnant, and in
whom the pregnancy is the most important thing in her life. However, in later
pregnancies, unwanted or not-definitely-wanted pregnancies, or pregnancies which
are only one of many ongoing issues for the woman, the emotional state is more
complicated, and likewise the dreams.
In these many examples and situations, we have again seen that the CI of the
dream pictures the dreamer’s underlying emotion or emotional concern. Again
thymophor -- translating emotion into imagery.
I have discussed in detail elsewhere ( Hartmann 2010a, 2011) the fact that
the dream does not simply replay waking events; it always combines things, adds
something new. This is true even in so-called recurrent or repetitive dreams, and
even in PTSD dreams ( Hartmann 2010a). Thus the dream is always a creation, not
simple replay. This is exactly the encyclopedia definition of creating a work of art.
“The creation of a work of art is the bringing about of a new combination of
elements in the medium. The elements existed beforehand but not in the same
combination; creation of is the re-formation of these pre-existing materials.” (Nash,
1986). And, at least for the last two hundred years, we have usually added a bit: “
…. Combining old material in new ways, guided by the artist’s emotion. Thus the
dream can be considered a work of art, or at least the beginning of one. Let us go on
to see whether we can find the thymophor in the more recognized forms of art as
well.
Starting with Poetry
Starting with film might be easiest, since we often feel that dreams are like
movies, and film has been called the most oneiric ( dreamlike) of the arts. But I’d
like to start with poetry, where the similarities may not be so obvious.
Ordinarily poems and dreams live in quite separate rooms of our mental
mansions. However, I will argue that a poem, at least a short memorable poem, is
actually very like a dream. I am not referring to poems that supposedly arrived fully
formed from a dream, such as Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. I am referring to a basic
similarity in the creation of dreams and poems.
The similarity I want to emphasize involves the Central Image (CI), discussed
above. A poem too, surprisingly often, contains a powerful Central Image that
pictures an emotional state. I suggest that what T.S. Eliot calls the “objective
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correlative” of the poem, or other work, is more or less identical to what we have
called the Central Image of the dream. (1917) He introduces the term:
“The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an
‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of
events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion.”
The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (2008) defines objective correlative as
“an external equivalent for an internal state of mind; thus any object, scene, event,
or situation that may be said to stand for or evoke a given mood or emotion.”
Eliot cites his own lines in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”:
I should have been a pair of ragged claws,
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
as the objective correlative picturing Prufrock’s emotional state of social shyness.
Of course, the first lines of Eliot’s poem:
Let us go then you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table.
are also an objective correlative, though they picture a harder-to-define emotional
state, that might be called a state of unease, or disturbance.
Another of the greatest poems of the 20th century – Yeats’ “ The Second
Coming” -- is built on two dramatic objective correlatives, or Central Images. It
begins:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
and ends:
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
These CIs pictures an emotional state that could be called something like
concern, turning to powerful apprehension, approaching dread.
Clearly not all poems contain a clear-cut objective correlative or CI. But not all
dreams do either. So let me narrow the field a bit: first of all, I believe we are
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speaking of short poems, and in fact the dreams we have discussed are short dreams
too. Both the dreams and the poems can usually fit on one or two pages in written
form – occasionally three or four. I cannot deal with book-length poems, and luckily
there are few or no book-length dreams. (I’m speaking of literal dreams, not
literary dreams in which a long narrative is framed as a dream or vision).
Ezra Pound (1934) defined three major aspects of poetry: Melopoieia refers to
the sound, the music of poetry; phanopoieia to the imagery; and logopoieia to the
sense or meaning. The correlation we are discussing, linking dreams and poems,
works best for short poems, and obviously it emphasizes the imagery: the
phanopoieia.
Let’s examine some actual poems. Since the boundaries of “poetry,” “good
poetry,” “real poetry” are notoriously difficult to define precisely, I shall consider
only well-known poems, poems recognized over time as “good” or “great” poems.
We might call these “big poems” -- analogous to “big dreams,” following Jung. And
I’ll try to stick with relatively short “big” poems.
Short image-dependent poems, then. My impression is that memorable,
impactful, “big” short poems, almost always contain one or more CIs, as we found
in big dreams. There’s always more than that, to be sure. The image is built of
words, and the words have both a sound and a sense, which ideally blends so well
with the imagery that a single entity is formed. Everything comes together.
First of all I want to look at some great and memorable poems that clearly do
contain one or two powerful central images. Leafing through anthologies, and
through the anthology in my head of poems I have read and remembered convinces
me that quite a number of the great short poems of the English language do appear
to work in this way. I’ll start with the 20th century, and briefly mention some poems
of previous centuries
We’ve already mentioned two of the great poems of the past 100 years: The
love song of J. Alfred Prufrock by Eliot and The Second Coming by Yeats, each of which
have powerful central images. Here is Robert Frost’s: Stopping by woods on a
snowy evening.
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Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
The image is supreme here. But of course it is integrated with the music and the
meaning. The words and the rhythm are so gentle, so song-like, that the narrator
(and we the reader) are pulled into the image of the snowy woods and are tempted
to stay (death? suicide?) until our harness is softly pulled, by the all-important word
“but,” and we return slowly to life, to our lives.
Here are some others, among the greatest short poems in English, going back
from the 20th century to Shakespeare. I hope they are familiar enough to the reader
so that I can cite the titles and need not include the complete texts here.
William Carlos Williams: The Red Wheelbarrow
Wallace Stevens:
Of Mere Being
Thomas Hardy:
In the Time of the Breaking of Nation
Wilfred Owen:
Strange Meeting
Sylvia Plath:
Tulips
Matthew Arnold:
Dover Beach
Emily Dickinson:
There’s a certain slant of light
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Walt Whitman:
O Captain! My Captain!
Percy Bysshe Shelley: Ozymandias
John Keats:
Ode to a Grecian Urn
William Blake:
The Tyger
William Shakespeare: Sonnet 73 (That time of year thou mayst in me behold)
I cannot talk of each poem in detail. My point is that these famous poems are
written in a variety of very different poetic styles and traditions, yet each of them
depends on one Central Image, or a few , which carry the emotional power.
Can all poetry be characterized in this way? No, certainly not. First of all, as
mentioned, really long poems can hardly be viewed as depending on one central
image. Some of the best known classic long poems such as Lucretius’s De rerum
Naturae, or Horace’s long odes on agriculture, are basically logopoieia, and they are
didactic, meant to teach the reader. Modern readers hardly consider these to be
poems, but rather essays or treatises, written in verse.
Other long poems, such as Dante’s 100-canto Divina Commedia are quite
different. Dante’s work is unquestionably poetry, often considered the greatest or
one of the greatest poems of the Western world. The work is bursting with imagery,
but it is impossible to pick out a single powerful image, because there are so many.
If each canto is considered as a separate short poem, then indeed one, or sometimes
two or three, central images can easily be found.
Similarly in Fitzgerald’s famous long poem ( or loose translation) “The
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,” a central image is prominent in almost every verse or
group of verses. For instance here is a marvelous image of fate:
“The Moving Finger writes: and having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”
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So I am definitely restricting the discussion to short poems, or short chunks of
long poems. This is not so different from the situation with dreams. It is very
difficult to deal with the occasional very long dream that occasionally show up in
research or clinical material. The researcher or student gives up on these, or if
necessary divides them into short chunks – as though the long dream were a series
of short dreams. So we are dealing with short poems, and short dreams.
Admittedly, not all short poems involve a powerful central image. Many
popular short poems depend heavily on a solid rhyme scheme and ease of recall.
And often a simple lesson. This is usually the case in poems for children. For
instance here’s a short poem, recited by coaches to millions of American children
and teenagers, and often remembered by many who hardly read poetry at all.
When that Great Scorer comes
To put a mark against your name,
He will score not whether you won or lost,
But how you played the game. ( Rice, 19--)
(Grantland Rice from Alumnus Football, 1932)
Such poems, though very well known, are certainly not considered among the
world’s great poems. I have gone through lengthy anthologies of “light verse” and
“humorous verse” as well as poetry for children and found innumerable such
examples. These poems contain a lesson, an aphorism, or a joke ( logopoeia) , and
they rely for their effect on the sound– an easy and regular rhyme scheme
(melopoieia) They almost never very seldom contain striking Central Images (
phanopoieia).
Thus in my perhaps prejudiced view the great short poems -– the ones I call
the “big short poems” -- almost always contain a central image, and in this way they
are closely related to “big “ short dreams.” In both cases thymophor, the
translation of emotion into imagery, is prominent.
Starting with Metaphor
We have discussed dreaming, which depends heavily on metaphor. The
Central Image of the dream is a picture-metaphor, a metaphor for the dreamer’s
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emotional state ( Hartmann, 2011 ). And as we have seen, poetry often depends on
a powerful metaphoric Central Image. Now let us briefly discuss metaphor itself.
For many years metaphor was taught only as one of many “figures of
speech,” along with simile, synecdoche etc., but it is now generally recognized that
metaphor is much more than that. Metaphor is everywhere, not only in our
language, but in our thought, and in our entire mental life. Lakoff and his associate
have convincingly demonstrated the ubiquity of metaphor in our thinking. (Lakoff &
Johnson, 1980; Lakoff & Turner, 1989) Lakoff’s group generally uses the term
“Conceptual Metaphor,” to make it clear that the discussion is not restricted to
poetic or decorative metaphor, but rather involves our basic concepts, our entire
framework of thought.
For instance, it is almost impossible to describe a relationship between two
people, without using a metaphoric phrase: (we’re really moving, we’re on the fast
track, it’s all downhill from here, we’re hitting a rough patch, it’s an uphill battle, it’s
time to bail out, etc., etc.). These are all subsumed under the conceptual metaphor “
A relationship is a journey.” We think in these metaphoric terms when thinking of a
relationship, or for that mater, of any important large concept, such as life, love,
mankind, etc. Metaphor appears to be an essential part of our thinking. A major
portion of the field known as cognitive linguistics has recently grown up around
this insight.
Lakoff and his associates are right in insisting that metaphor is essential to
our thought as well as our language. However, the discussions of Conceptual
Metaphor usually omit an obviously important element --the emotion – which I
believe is essential to understanding the metaphor. It is the underlying emotion of
the user ( speaker or writer) that determines which metaphor will be used. “It’s
time to bail out” implies a very different underlying emotional state from “ it’s all
smooth sailing,” within “Love is a journey.”
A Metaphor generally explains the “tenor” of the metaphor (the first term,
the subject being discussed) by providing a “vehicle” (the second term), which is
simpler or more easily pictured. ( This second term is also called the “source” or
“source domain”). Thus “man is a wolf” or “love is a bumpy journey” work as useful
metaphors. The metaphor does not simply find a similarity between any two terms,
as some have claimed. The reversed phrasing: “a wolf is man” or “ a bumpy
journey is love” do not work, and sound confusing.
Often, especially in a poem or in a dream, only the vehicle of the metaphor is
stated. The tenor ( love, life, death ) has to be understood by the reader of the
poem, or whoever is trying to understand the dream.
The vehicle of the metaphor in some sense explains the tenor, but it tells
only a part of the truth. Of course love – in the sense of a continuing relationship -is a journey, but love is also a growing plant, or two intertwined plants, or it may be
a competition, a fight, a war. Everything depends on the underlying emotion. The
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choice of vehicle is guided by our underlying emotion. And as we saw above, the
emotion also determines which specific metaphor will be used, when we think or
talk using the broad conceptual metaphor: “love is a journey.”
When we say, “ Man is a wolf” it goes without saying that we are portraying a
certain aspect of man – rapaciousness, violence, greed. And we’ re usually picturing
our (negative) feeling for that part of man. Similarly, speaking of a particular man,
we can say, “That man is a monster,” which pictures our hatred and/or fear of that
man. When we say, “That woman (or that man) is an angel, we are calling up
another portion of that person, guided by our feelings -– this time a more positive
feeling.
It is worth noting that although these metaphoric descriptions may
sometimes feel accurate, the pictures they provide are not complete, and certainly
not completely true. They give only a very partial description. They do not provide
an overall description or definition of man, or of that man. What we are saying is I
like, or I fear, or I dislike, that man. They are accurate pictures of our emotional
state – our feelings (at the time) about man, or about that particular man.
Simply stating that the vehicle of the metaphor is chosen according to our
emotion is true, and often obvious, but it gives emotion only a subsidiary role. I
believe we can more accurately state that what is being pictured –- the tenor of the
metaphor -– is not the large concept (life, love, man) but the emotional state itself:
our emotional attitude towards life, love, man. It is actually the underlying
emotional state that is the tenor of the metaphor. So we can note that metaphor is
often Thymophor – an emotion-picturing metaphor, that turns an emotion, or
emotional attitude, into an image -- similarly to what we have found in the Central
Image of the dream, and of the poem.
In the dream too, I have argued that the underlying emotion is essential in
understanding the dream imagery. Some, including Lakoff himself have examined
the dream in terms of Lakoff’s conceptual metaphors (1993). In this sense one
considers the dream image as “metaphorically picturing” or “symbolizing” a
concept or an event. Indeed a dream journey often seems to picture the dreamer’s
life, or relationships.
However, I consider this a very incomplete view, since again it omits the
emotion.. About the Tidal Wave Dream, for instance, I have been asked: “ Aren’t you
saying that the tidal wave symbolizes the fire or the attack?” Well, no. That way of
thinking avoids the main issue. Why should a tidal wave symbolize a fire or an
attack? There is no resemblance between these items except for the emotion. The
emotion drives the imagery, and in the simplest case the picture is an excellent
description of the emotional state: “How do you feel (having just escaped from a
fire in which your brother died) ?” “Tidal wave!”
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Similarly, a poem’s Central Image does not simply describe a scene, or a
concept. Reading Frost’s poem ( as mentioned above) it is possible to listen to
the melody and love the beautiful snowy woods, and not think of a metaphor at all.
Children, and readers first coming upon the poem may read it that way. Or one can
think of the snowy woods as a metaphoric picture of a gentle life, lived in a rural
setting. But then, on more careful reading, we run into the word “but” in the last
verse, which tells us to look again. It gives us an emotional tone. The woods are not
just pretty. They pull us/him in. He considers remaining there. The woods are
peaceful sleep; the woods are death, suicide perhaps. He pulls himself away: BUT I
have promises to keep. The woods are not a generic, conceptual metaphor: it is not
the case that deep woods obviously or always stand for death. It is this particular
speaker’s emotion that we begin to feel and understand. The emotion makes the
metaphor, and makes the poem.
Again, we have met the Thymophor. We see that a conceptual metaphor
provides only a partial, generic description of its subject, the tenor of the metaphor,
( life, love, man) if we leave out emotion. However, the metaphoric phrase often
pictures clearly the underlying emotion. So the Thymophor is a more common
beast than we at first thought. It shows up as an essential element in our everyday
inescapable use of metaphor (“It looks like a bumpy road ahead”) as well as in our
dreams and our poetry.
Starting with Other Arts: emotion translated into imagery in painting,
sculpture and music
Our examination of metaphor can leads us directly to one form or art or
almost-art: the cartoon or the caricature. This usually takes the form of drawing,
or painting, but occasionally sculpture or other forms as well.
Caricature
A cartoon or political caricature may involve a direct picture of a metaphor.
A cartoon may show a man -- a politician, say -- as a wolf, or a pig, or a snake. Here
a caricature is nothing but a painted or drawn metaphor, and usually the emotion
20
attached is quite clear. This can be considered a very simple example of emotioncarrying metaphor, or thymophor.
In the caricatures or cartoons that make an impression (“big caricatures?”),
the caricaturist’s (artist’s, cartoonist’s) emotional attitude is very obviously being
pictured or emphasized “ (In my opinion) that man is a pig, feeding himself at the
expense of the poor. “ Or in some cases a negative emotional attitude to a whole
field such as medicine or law. Daumier’s well-known caricatures are wonderful
examples, and he created these caricatures as sculptures,, as well as paintings and
drawings.
Sometimes the caricature simply exaggerates one aspect of the subject’s
physical appearance. Whatever feature is slightly odd, or too big, or ugly in the
subject is made twice as odd, twice as big or ugly in the caricature. This may seem to
be only a draughtsman’s trick, but usually an emotional statement is being made
too. The caricature “puts people in their place.” It allows us to laugh at a big
important man: “ doesn’t he look ugly!” or a class of persons (greedy lawyers; fat
plutocrats) or occasionally to laugh at all mankind: “aren’t we a silly-looking bunch
of creatures!”
Here in cartoons and caricatures we have a thymophor in relatively pure
form: the image very directly pictures either an emotional metaphor, or an
emotional attitude. The details of the craft – just how the picture is drawn or
painted – are of less importance here than in other arts. And indeed some will argue
that caricature is not truly an art at all.
There is another sort of art that specializes in depicting emotion, often in
exaggerated form. I don’t think the genre has an overall name. It includes items such
as the heads sculpted by Franz Xavier Messerschmidt in the 18th century; each
showing a face in the grip (throes?) of an emotion, in highly exaggerated form. (Ilg,
1885). A great deal of photographic art falls in this category, trying to depict a
strong emotion or emotional tone, sometimes clearly showing extremes of emotion.
Such art could be considered a form that is often very basic and very concrete
thymophor. A kind of naked thymophor perhaps. The craft plays a minor role,
though this is not always the case: for instance, Munch’s “The Scream” could be
included as a depiction of emotion, though there’s much more involved.
Painting, sculpture
Let’s move on to the more traditional fine arts and consider broadly the
classic visual arts such as painting and sculpture. Finding the thymophor will be
easiest if we start with non-representational art. Consider a painter who works by
stretching a canvas , and painting whatever occurs to her or him. The result may
be abstract, -- lines, spaces, splotches of color, drippings of paint-- or there may be
suggestions of people or objects, or places. What is this painter painting? I’d say in
a broad sense that she’s painting her emotional state. What else is there? Of course,
21
she may well say that the picture is a depiction of a landscape she knows or
imagines, or an impression of a person in her memory, or many other things. But
clearly she is not producing a camera image of that scene. She is at least in part
painting her emotional state. Sometimes she will state directly: “I’m painting the
way I feel today.”
How about the more traditional painter , outdoors, painting an actual
landscape in front of him, or an interior, or a bowl of fruit. What is he painting? He
may say, “I’m painting it just as it is,” or “I paint what I see.” But of course it’s not “
just as it is.” It’s a painting, not an actual landscape. And different painters will
come out with totally different paintings of the same landscape. 1
“I paint what I see” may be the artist’s honest view, but the “I” is usually
more important than the “see.” And the “I” is of course not just the “eye.” The “I” is
the entire person of the painter, which comprises past history, personality, and
emotional state. (Past history and personality are important in forming the
painter’s style, and are also important in determining the present emotional state.)
Two painters do not “see” the same thing. I suggest that often “ I paint what I feel”
is more accurate than “ I paint what I see,” or at least that the two work in
conjunction.
Or a painter may state some form of “ I’m looking for the truth, or the
essence, of the landscape/ interior /fruit.” That’s fine, but the question arises as
to whether the truth turns out to be a universal truth or essence, or rather an
emotional truth within the artist.
Nothing new here. It is a truism that different painters painting the same
scene will come out with different results. Painters, and critics, will tend to describe
the differences in terms of craft or technique. Indeed craft is hugely important, and
sometimes the details of the craft overwhelm or hide any attempt to find a
thymophor. In a sense the craft is the art. The paints and pigments chosen, the
material painted on (stucco, canvas, paper, wood, etc.), the brushes or other
instruments to apply the paint, the style of application, the thickness of the paint,
the length of the brushstrokes, the force applied, etc. These elements make all the
difference, and can explain the different results, the different styles of the painters.
Craft is surely important, but is it the total picture?
I’d say not. I believe that all the elements of the craft are important, but they
are not enough to explain the picture. There is an emotional state being expressed,
This is reminiscent of what we saw in dreams. The dreamer may for various
reasons want to emphasize that the dream repeats the actual scene, for instance the
traumatic scene. “ Just the way it was.” However, on examination, we find there’s
always something added. And the addition is guided by the dreamer’s
emotion(Hartmann 2010a).
1
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even in a depiction of a landscape, though this is far clearer in some painters, than in
others. To some extent “I paint what I feel” always plays a part.
As a very simplistic experiment, let’s put two pictures up in our mind’s
gallery – two landscape paintings, both showing a field in a countryside in Southern
France. One is a fairly realistic depiction, by an unknown painter, that looks
somewhat like a color photo. The other is one of Van Gogh’s paintings of the same
scene. How are the two different? Well, we can describe many differences: In the
Van Gogh, the paint is thicker, the brush strokes are shorter, the application seems
stronger and more abrupt, the pigments emphasize yellow and gold. An expert could
go on for several more pages. But are we satisfied with this description? Isn’t there
more? Isn’t there some form of thymophor? Some emotional state – presumably
Van Gogh’s emotional state – is being pictured, and we feel some of this as we look
at it. He may well have been painting what he saw, but we do not look at his
painting to get a precise depiction of the grasses and flowers of Southern France.
Nor do we (most of us amateurs at least) look at the painting to admire the specific
details of the unusual brush strokes. What we see and feel is a powerful image of an
emotional state: the thymophor.
I believe that to a certain extent the painter is always painting what s/he
feels, not simply what s/he sees. Van Gogh is unusually dramatic. His emotion is
right out on the surface, screaming at us. For some painters, perhaps for the painter
of the other picture in our imagined gallery, the emotion may be something less
dramatic -- something like a mild, calm love of nature. We see this in much of the
painting covering the walls of a waiting room or office.
Critics and other painters may consider the brushstrokes and pigments and
other essential elements for their own sakes. We, as amateur appreciators, can see
these as clothing for the thymophor – much as we could see the words and lines of a
“big short” poem as similarly clothing the thymophor, the emotion-carrying central
image. Considering poetry we noted that this view makes sense especially for “big
short poems,” as it does for “big short dreams.” Perhaps the same is true of
painting: perhaps we find the thymophor especially in certain impactful “big”
paintings.
Clearly, in painting and other arts, the elements of the craft are essential, but
I believe that the picturing or carrying over of emotion -- the thymophor – is
important too, in the creation of the work., We should keep in mind that “emotion”
covers a lot of ground. We do not necessarily have to think of personal anguish, or
anger, or sadness. In many of the religion-themed paintings that fill our grand
museums and Christian churches, the dominant emotion is “awe, wonder, mystery.”
This is an emotion that does not show up on typical lists of the four or six most basic
human emotions, but it does appear as one of the eighteen basic emotions in our
studies of emotions pictured by the CI of the dream ( fig 1). And we find that this
emotion is scored quite frequently, especially in “big” dreams.
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Film and longer visual works
So far, we have considered a single painting, or drawing, caricature,
sculpture, rather than with something longer, such as a film, a series of paintings, or
tapestries, perhaps. A single work appears to be closer to the moment of inspiration,
to the thymophor as a unit of artistic creation, and closer to the “big dream” or “big
poem”. With film, or longer visual works, we are faced with the same issues as with
long poems, long literary works, or even long dreams. Life becomes more
complicated. We may find a series of dramatic emotional images, within a lengthy
story-context. We can sometimes find a CI, a thymophor, in a certain portion of the
work. For instance, there are certain dramatic images that we remember in classic
films: the cut eyeball in Bunuel/Cocteau, Un Chien Andalou , the knight playing
chess with death in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, T.E. Lawrence emerging
gloriously from the shimmering desert in Lawrence of Arabia. These moments are
definitely emotional, and have the basic characteristics of thymophor. So, again, a
longer work is problematic, but we can find thymophor if we are willing to look at
bits or chunks of it.
Music
What about music? It has often been stated that music is especially close to
the emotions, and indeed a short piece of music, such as a typical love song pictures
an emotional state very directly. Similarly, the music of an operatic aria usually
portrays the emotional state of the character singing it. Sometimes a short theme
in instrumental music perfectly pictures a mood : anyone listening to the first bars
of Beethoven’s Pathetique sonata feels a sense of sadness . This is also an instance
of thymophor: if we can think in terms of an auditory image, rather than a visual
image, the first bars of Pathetique are a Central Image carrying the emotion of grief
or sadness.
An instrumental piece may involve a spontaneous outpouring, picturing
the composer’s underlying emotional state, but not necessarily. The composer may
also be picturing an emotional state s/he is imagining or inventing. In fact the
composer of an opera or musical comedy tries hard to compose different music for
each character, picturing that character’s emotional state. The same is true of a
playwright or dramatic poet, who frequently chooses words to picture the separate
emotional states of each character.
For some, the idea of an auditory image is obvious and clear, but for many of
us who are very visual, it takes time to accept the idea. Our dream images are
overwhelmingly visual, even in those who love music and play music. However,
some composers report that they definitely dream in music. Mozart and Wagner
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both claimed that they heard their music in dreams. Others see a visual image of the
score -- actually picturing the notes on paper, or picturing a modified image of the
notes on paper: in one recent instance, a composer dreamt of pine trees scrabbling
their way up a snowy hillside, which suggested to him in musical notation the
ascending arpeggios he needed to complete his composition. (Knudson, 2001).
If we can accept the idea of an auditory image, then thymophor -- translating
emotion into imagery – definitely occurs in music.
Thymophor and Memory: An Experiment in Autobiographical Memory
Memory is an extremely complex subject and I will not try to discuss it in
detail here. There are at least four separate, identifiable types of human memory
(Miyushita, 2004). One of these is “episodic declarative memory,” often called
“autobiographical memory.”
There is general agreement that our autobiographical memory system is
strongly affected by our emotions, and that memory is a constructive process; we
are constantly making small alterations in our memories. For instance, we have a
tendency to forget, repress, or alter memories that are not in accord with our selfimage. Nietzsche already knew or intuited this in the 19th century: “ ‘I did it’ says
my memory. ‘But I could not have done it’ says my pride. ‘ But I did it…’ And so,
back-and-forth, until finally memory gives in.” (Nietzsche, 1885).
Overall, we usually remember best what is striking or unusual and what is
emotionally important to us. For instance, I have windsurfed on a beach in Truro, on
Cape Cod, many times over the years, but I remember hardly any details of these
experiences. However, on one occasion, twenty dolphins found me and circled
around me on my sailboard for several minutes. This was not only unusual (it is
rare to see any dolphins in Truro), but it was emotionally striking. I felt a sense of
awe, first mixed with a little fear, and then I felt somehow blessed. I believe I will
always remember that particular episode. I can still see it, clearly and visually, in
my mind.
Following up on this, I decided to jot down, as quickly as I could, whatever
memorable moments leapt out at me, going back year by year to my childhood. I
was not interested in long series of memories about a particular person or place—
the way we usually search our memories. I was simply looking for moments of
memory that stood out strongly from the background.
In fifteen minutes, I had written down 28 specific memories. Later, looking
them over one by one, I found that what I had written down in each case was a
visual scene, sometimes in considerable detail. And each scene involved a strong
emotion. However what stayed in my mind, what I remembered and wrote down,
was the visual scene, not so much the emotion. The emotion was obviously there; it
had “tagged” the scene or event that was to be remembered.
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Based on many interviews, I realize that not everyone remembers things in
as vivid a visual form as I do; there is quite a range of visual memory. But the
emotional element is found in everyone, as far as I can tell, whether the visual
imagery is clear and detailed or not.
Autobiographies, biographies, and even novels are usually organized
around emotional moments in a similar way. They contain mostly what is
emotionally important to the author or narrator. In an autobiography or memoir
such as Proust’s incredibly detailed “À la recherche du temps perdu” we may initially
feel that his memory is simply gigantic, and that he includes everything, but
obviously, he does not. He remembers what is emotionally important to him -- in
his case the appearance, personality, and quirks of his numerous family members,
friends and acquaintances, and the details of their interactions. He describes the
details in vivid visual form, which makes it easy for the reader to “see” the scene,
and makes me suppose that when he recalled a scene, he “saw” it visually as well.
Emotion-guided autobiographical memory has also been studied by
psychoanalysis over the past 100 years. The course of treatment, in psychoanalysis
and related dynamic psychotherapies, involves constant work with the patient’s
memory –- the telling, retelling, and reexamining of the personal past. There is
generally a slow, gradual learning about one’s life and behavior patterns, and an
attempt to understand current relationships and relate them to past ones. But,
occasionally there are moments involving a sudden insight or an “aha” experience.
These emotional moments often involve visual or other perceptual modalities:
I suddenly saw it. It came to me in a flash. I saw my mother criticizing me, and
turning away from me, stalking out of the room before I could say anything. And I
realize that’s just what I have been doing to my children . . . I feel like screaming.
Such instances involve old and new memory images, usually in visual form,
and connections between them. They may occur when a current emotion, say in the
relationship to the therapist, is very similar to an old emotion related to parents or
other figures from the past. These flashes of memory can be considered instances of
creativity. They make new connections in old material, guided by emotion, and thus,
they are instances of thymophor.
Overall, our memories definitely include emotion-guided imagery. Emotion
guides or drives the process, but what appears in memory is the image –- usually a
visual image –- that captures or pictures the emotion –- similarly to what happens in
the dream.
The importance of this emotion-guided memory goes far beyond these
sudden flashes of insight. Emotion not only determines what memories are most
easily remembered. Emotion is also essential in determining what gets into the
memory stores in the first place and how it is organized. I have suggested that
dreaming plays an important role in this process (Hartmann, 1998, 2011). The CI of
the dream carries the underlying emotion, as we have discussed. We have called the
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CI of the dream the beginning of a work of art. But this is definitely not the
beginning of art for art’s sake. There is an adaptive function related to memory. I
have suggested that the dream (especially the CI) connects new memories with old
memory stores, based on emotion, and plays a crucial role in organizing our
memory systems in accordance with what is emotionally important. This is indeed
the way our memory systems appear to be organized, and this is by no means a
small detail about memory storage. This is who we are; this is our unique self. We
are our emotionally guided memory systems.
In this sense, thymophor is involved in creation, at a larger level. Our lifelong
creation of ourselves is based on our emotions and our emotion-guided imagery,
which determines what we remember and in what patterns.
Thymophor as a Basic Element of our Creative Process in the Mind and in the
Brain
We have discussed thymophor as it appears in the central image of the
dream and in the “big short poem”, and in other arts as well. We have seen how
thymophor supplies the emotional sense of metaphor, and we have suggested at a
role for thymophor in organizing autobiographical memory.
Thymophor can be approached in a number of other ways as well, which I
explore elsewhere (Hartmann, to be published), and will only mention briefly here.
For instance, thymophor may be important in understanding the process of
translation: it is accepted that, although literal or logical meaning can be readily
translated, poetry is extremely hard to translate successfully from one language to
another. Indeed the prosody of poetry, the sound of the language (melopoieia), is
very difficult to translate. However the thymophor -- the emotionally driven central
imagery--lies behind the language and usually survives translation into another
language quite well.
Thymophor also plays a role in our myths and the archetypal figures that
inhabit the myths. Almost always, these figures involve a powerful emotional state
clothed ( imaged) in flesh.
We have discussed thymophor especially as a part of artistic creation, but I
believe it plays a role in other types of creativity as well. For instance, scientific
creativity is often described as a coming together or merging of different lines of
thought—referred to, for instance, as “bisociation” by Koestler (1964). Imagery is
most often part of the creative process (Einstein, 1945), But the emotion is usually
left out in these descriptions. I believe that the emotional element is crucial, though
it is difficult to give this emotion a simple name. I suggest a combination of several
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emotions: first, the “awe-wonder-mystery” (discussed above) that the scientist feels
while looking at a problem in nature. Then, there is the “powerful push” or
“desperate need” to find a solution or connection. And finally, a “wow” feeling-perhaps another instance of “awe-wonder-mystery”--when a solution is found.
Emotion does play an important role, though the imagery does not picture or
translate the emotion here as straightforwardly as in artistic creation.
Finally, the thymophor, which we have found so prominently in many types
of human functioning, clearly must have an underlying brain biology. The details
are not certain at present, but we can obtain some rough hints from studies of REM
sleep, the brain state most associated with dreaming, and also from studies of the
brain’s “default network”.
(fig 2 about here)
First of all, thymophor generally occurs during the kind of mental activity
which we situate towards the right end of the continuum of mental functioning
(Figure 2) which we have discussed in detail elsewhere (Hartmann, 2007, 2010b,
2011). This continuum of mental functioning is also a continuum of brain (chiefly
cerebral cortical) functioning. Thymophor seems to occur chiefly in states of artistic
reverie, daydreaming and dreaming. And there is a great deal of overlap between
these states. Dreaming is not “totally different” from the rest, as we sometimes
seem to believe.
Studies of activation patterns during REM sleep can give us a hint, since we
have seen thymophor so prominently in dreaming(Braun et al, 1997;Maquet et al,
1996; Maquet et al, 2004; Nofzinger et al, 1997; Sutton et al, 1996; Jakobson et al,
2012). I believe that the decreased activation of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex
(DLPFC) and increased activation of ventromedial portions of the frontal cortex
certainly play a role in the biology of thymophor.
The very definition of thymophor—emotion—translated into imagery—
suggests roughly what may be going on in the brain. Imagery implies widespread
cortical activation. The powerful role of emotion implies subcortical input from the
amygdala and related regions.
More specifically, since thymophor occurs not only in dreaming, but also in
“artistic reverie”, or daydreaming, the underlying biology must be related to the
brain biology underlying these states, which has been called the brain’s default
network (Buckner, 2008). We note that there’s considerable overlap between the
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brain biology of this default network and the brain biology of REM sleep. Thus,
thymophor occurs at times of activation of ventromedial PFC and activation of the
various medial temporal and parietal regions involved in the default network.
But all this is only the background within which thymophor occurs. The PET
and fMRI techniques, establishing regions of activation, as above, have excellent
spatial resolution, but they have poor temporal resolution. They cannot show
spread of activation. The temporal element in thymophor is very important, since
thymophor can occur in very short time intervals within the dream and in creative
reverie. A rapid spread of activation and simultaneous or near-simultaneous
activation of cortical and subcortical regions is most likely involved, However,
exploring these temporal aspects will have to wait for studies using
magnetoencephalography (MEG) and similar techniques.
Conclusion
Much is still unknown. But I hope I have convinced the reader that this
strange beast we have called thymophor –-the translation of emotion into imagery –
actually does exist, and that thymophor is an important element in human creativity
including dreams and art, and that it may play a role in memory as well. It is at least
worth exploring further.
………………………………………
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Figure 1. Scoring dreams for the Central Image
SCORING DREAMS FOR THE CENTRAL IMAGE
Definition: A Central Image (contextualizing image) is a striking, arresting, or compelling image —
not simply a story — but an image, which stands out by virtue of being especially powerful, vivid,
bizarre, or detailed.
List of Emotions
1.
fear, terror
11.
supremacy
2. helplessness, vulnerability, being trapped, being immobilized
12.
3. anxiety, vigilance
13.
excitement
4. despair, hopelessness (giving up)
5. anger, frustration
6. disturbing — cognitive dissonance, disorientation, weirdness
7. guilt
14.
8. grief, loss, sadness, abandonment, disappointment
15.
16.
9. shame, inadequacy
17.
10. disgust, repulsion
18.
power, mastery
awe, wonder, mystery
happiness, joy,
hope
peace, restfulness
longing
relief, safety
love (relationship)
If there is a second contextualizing image in a dream, score on a separate line.
Dream
1. CI?
ID#
(Y/N)
3. Intensity
2. What is it?
(rate 0 – 3)
4. What emotion?
5. Second emotion?
30
Figure 2 A Continuum of Mental Functioning
Although we often consider dreaming to be “totally different” from the other states,
research shows that there is actually considerable overlap.
31
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