Monday, June 27, 2011

I was a teenage tri-psychal



Literature, philosophy, and psychology is the sequence of domains that bridged late high school (philosophy in “English Seminar”) and college years (philosophy and psychology, double major). Then I got “politicized,” as they say (and sociologized, which I regret), which prevailed for graduate school and later.

But time has taught me that I belong to a nexus of literature, philosophy, and psychology. The dispositions of the 19 year-old have been the chord evidently integral to who I am. I went through decades outwardly sociopolitical but inwardly psychaliterary (better, to me, than ‘psycholiterary’). Even grad school in philosophy included regular involvement with the Creative Writing Program, as well as with Psychology. My unwieldy library certifies the point for succeeding decades.

Until a few years ago, the rubric “literary psychology” didn’t occur to me. In my early 20s, I sought to create a new domain called “literary anthropology,” but I knew I was being eccentric and shelved the matter. Now “litarary Darwinism” is a recognized area of literary studies.

I place myself in an intersection of streams: psychology, philosophy, and literature (a reversal of the sequence, like a homecoming). I’m living in a learning nexus of philosophy, psychology, and literature. I’m a literary philosophical psychologist—a psychaliterary philosopher, a philopsychal literary writer.