The Seba library treats Poiesis in 8 passages, across 6 authors (including Hillman, James, Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Lacan, Jacques).
poiesis, which means simply ‘making,’ and which I take to mean making by imagination into words… the rhetoric of poiesis… the persuasive power of imagining in words, an artfulness in speaking and hearing, writing and reading.
Hillman installs poiesis as the foundational act of depth psychology, defining it as imaginative making in language and grounding a ‘poetic basis of mind’ that distinguishes his psychology from neurological or behavioural alternatives.
, Healing Fiction, 1983thesis
Poiesis is thus seen as an instrumental type of operation… poiesis is defined by contrast with praxis. In acting, a man acts for himself; he does not produce anything but his own activity.
Vernant establishes the classical Aristotelian distinction between poiesis as outward-directed instrumental production and praxis as self-constituting action, providing the ontological baseline against which later depth-psychological appropriations of the term operate.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983thesis
When we speak about poiesis, we are speaking about creation, but do you not see that the use we make of it is all the same more limited, because it is to these sorts of creators who are called poets.
Lacan, reading Diotima’s discourse in the Symposium, identifies the philosophical breadth of poiesis as creation-as-such while noting its cultural narrowing to poetry, linking the term to Eros and the dialectic of lack.
, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015thesis
madness is a matter of interpretation, a delusional poiesis — truly a mental disease, a psychic disorder, an account of which cannot be put in objective terms.
Hillman extends poiesis into psychopathology by way of Adler, arguing that psychotic delusion is itself a form of making — a pathological fiction — thereby demonstrating that all psychic life is constitutively poietic.
, Healing Fiction, 1983supporting
Steve Levine, editor of Poiesis: A Journal of the Arts and Communication, and its predecessor, C. R. E. A. T. E.
McNiff’s acknowledgement of the journal Poiesis documents the term’s institutionalization as a guiding concept within expressive arts therapy and creative-arts psychotherapy practice.
, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004supporting
poetic creation contains an element which is not ‘chosen,’ but ‘given’; and to old Greek piety ‘given’ signifies ‘divinely given.’
Dodds situates archaic poetic creation within a theology of inspiration, establishing the historical context — divine possession as the source of making — against which later depth-psychological secularizations of poiesis are measured.
, The Greeks and the Irrational, 1951supporting
the creative imagination neither ‘just’ sees nor ‘just’ creates, but brings the new into existence through the combination of both, so rendering the authorship of what emerges ambiguous.
McGilchrist’s account of creative making as a co-authorship between consciousness and something below it resonates with the depth-psychological understanding of poiesis as arising from a psychic depth not fully controlled by the ego.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
depth psychology invented a new kind of practitioner and patient, a new language, a new style of ritual, and of loving, so it shaped a new genre of story.
Hillman frames depth psychology’s emergence as itself a poietic act — a genre-making — connecting the therapeutic enterprise to the imaginative making that poiesis names.
, Healing Fiction, 1983aside