Fundamentals of a Psychosynthetic Literary Analysis Approach and Applying it to an Italian Poem Giovanni Papini: C’è un canto dentro di me

Abstract

This is the third of three related articles. The first one (Tóth-Izsó & Lombard, 2022a) presents the two authors’ English translations of the Italian poem indicated in the title and compares them depending on the translators’ experiences before and during the translation. It is also shown how the resultant translations are determined both by the salient features of the source text and by the individual readings of the source text by the translators. The second one (Tóth-Izsó & Lombard, 2022b) presents deconstructionist literary analyses of these translations and thus demonstrates how the two authors interpreted their own translations – and also the Italian original – in the deconstructionist analysis frame. This third article describes the fundamentals of a proposed psychosynthetic literary analysis methodology with illustrative examples. The basic idea is that the proposed analysis (including the study of translations) should be based on continuously interacting and partly independent self-centers – so called subpersonalities – of the author or characters in the analyzed piece as the objects of analysis. In Assagioli’s psychosynthesis the Self is a distinguished permanent center, which is above and unaffected by the flow of the mind-stream. The analysis levels of (I) personal, (II) transpersonal and (III) global psychosynthesis were identified, and to each of these levels further specific guidelines are provided. This approach is proposed because a common feature of all other existing systems is that they cannot satisfactorily grasp and interpret such psychic phenomena as interacting parts within one psyche or the so-called “peak experiences.” The aim is to widen the scope of already available approaches. Having reviewed a significant, but still limited part of the Italian, British/American English, and Hungarian polite literature, it was found that in the case of a surprisingly large portion of these about a hundred studied pieces it was possible to analyze them successfully by the proposed approach. Finally, the author compares the results of her psychosynthetic and deconstructionist analyses. In conclusion, an outline is given about the possibilities and limitations of the proposed psychosynthetic literary criticism approach.