Revisiting “The Art of Being Fragile”: Why cultural psychology needs literature and poetry

Abstract

Writers devote their lives to find words that faithfully resemble what is at the core of human experience and existence. Thus, psychologists interested in understanding human development in everyday life could turn toward writers and poets with humble curiosity. In this article, we illustrate how a narrative analysis of a work of art can be done, taking “The Art of Being Fragile. How Leopardi can Save your Life” by the Italian writer and teacher Alessandro D’Avenia as a case. In addition, we reflect upon the mastery with which the author sheds light on aspects that theories in cultural psychology have tried to unveil. Such aspects are: (a) poetic activism: a revolution of the poetics of everyday life; (b) the poetics of human development; (c) the beauty within the fragile as a master; and (d) the intuition of the spirit as an invitation.

Keywords

Poetry literature qualitative methods existential meaning beauty human development cultural psychology meaning making compassion values spiritual dimension

Writers devote their lives to words that configurate the landscapes of reality and imagination, while diving into the intensity of human experience and existence in ways that had remained ineffable for most of us. Finding ourselves captivated by verses and paragraphs that speak to us and about us in ways that didn’t exist in our stream of consciousness but which we had been longing for, is a transformative encounter. Writers raise questions, intuitions, answers, invitations, they make us travel companions on the journeys they narrate. Books are tools that mediate our meaning-making, decision-making, and value-adding processes, shaping the ways in which we relate to the world and ourselves. Vygotsky himself believed in the arts and literature as crucial for the advancement of psychology (Vygotsky, 1925/1971). Following this line of thought, some cultural psychologists have used literature as a ground for theoretical explorations (e.g., Leão & Guimarães, 2017; Valsiner, 2015), while others have highlighted the possibilities of using it as a research methodology (e.g., Brinkmann, 2009, 2012; Moghaddam, 2004). In parallel, some cultural psychologists have strived to bring in closer poetry to the theories of cultural psychology (e.g., Lehmann, Chaudhary, Bastos, & Abbey, 2017), which was a goal for Vygotsky (1925/1971) as well, yet his attempts to develop these intuitions further remained unfinished due to his premature death.

In this article, we attempt to revive a dialogue between poetic literature and cultural psychology, bridging artistic and scientific nuances of inquiry and research. Many of us, as cultural psychologists, lean into literature in our daily lives and many of the human beings whose everyday lives we study befriend pieces of literature as key companions in the midst of the uncertainty and ambiguity that characterize our human condition. Precisely, highlighting functions of literature in human development could bring us closer to a psychology which is faithful to the human condition. By this, we are not necessarily suggesting that psychologists should attempt nor limit themselves to literary criticism, but rather that we could strengthen our literary passion and our poetic awareness. For instance, if the quest of psychology is to focus on affect at the core of human experience and existence, poetry can inform psychological theories of the tensions that form affective processes, as well as honoring our search for beauty as an act to reconcile the contradictions, uncertainties, and tragedies of life (Lehmann, 2018). In this sense, turning toward the arts as our primary cultural resources could expand our possibilities for scientific innovation (Lehmann & Klempe, 2017). Indeed:

The poetic power of cultural elements is unpredictable and considerable; it transforms over time and leaves traces in human psyche and shared culture. It is of great importance for sociocultural psychology to address poesis—it is an invisible yet powerful aspect of human experience. Establishing such a new field of enquiry in psychology is therefore welcome and refreshing (…) Yet it is a difficult exercise that demands standing on the solid base established by the field, implying theoretical, methodological and ethical obligations (Marková, 2016). Bearing this in mind, researchers may write new pages of psychology. (Zittoun, 2017, pp. 91–92)

Having clearer outlines on how to use literature in qualitative inquiry could motivate researchers to get in touch with “invisible” fibers of human development, which can shed light on theoretical gaps in our discipline. Thus, qualitative researchers could aspire to carry out work that bears within it some of the same evocative power of novelists (Brinkmann, 2009) or poets (Lehmann, Chaudhary, & Abbey, 2017). That is, embarking on this quest by striving to portray human experience in its richness and complexity, and by inviting readers to stand in the landscapes of the feelings and emotions that other persons convey. As an interlude between these perspectives, we attempt to illustrate how to analyze qualitatively a piece of poetic literature. The work of art that we use for this purpose is “L’Arte di Essere Fragili (The Art of Being Fragile. How Leopardi can Save your Life),” written by Alessandro D’Avenia (2016). While doing so, we ground as well some theoretical explorations in cultural psychology, inspired by some excerpts of such a text evoke.

Books as everyday life materials in qualitative research

The accuracy of descriptions of some pieces of literature gives room for researchers to access profound layers of human experience, which conventional research reports can hardly convey (Brinkmann, 2012; Lehmann & Brinkmann, 2019). In doing so, books can become gates toward intimate and private rooms of the psyche, where secrets about experience and existence are whispered to the curious witnesses who open the pages and immerse themselves into a story which they cannot alter, yet they can relate to. This sense of relatability to the reality that is being introduced to us, and the imagination of that which is not said, activates the person emotionally. In such affective nuances, literature can strengthen our sense of empathy and compassion. Indeed, reading fiction is said to expand our understanding of the subjective states of others (Kidd & Castano, 2013), and creative writing can improve mental and physical health as well (Stuckey & Nobel, 2010).

On the one hand, empathy, or Enfühlung, refers to the human capacity of “feeling into” an environment, another person, or ourselves (Valsiner, 2014). On the other hand, compassion is the motivation and empowerment to reduce someone's suffering, after feeling into or empathizing with their experience (Schulz & Monin, 2018). Thus, reading literature might improve our capacity of feeling into the world, amplifying our sense of self and otherness, and therefore, literature is a bridge to understand the affective processes that are at the core of human experience and existence. Tension, ambiguity, uncertainty, ambivalences, resistances, are part of meaning-making, decision-making, and value-grasping processes, and psychology requires both theoretical and methodological frames to explore these multilayered aspects of these affective processes (Lehmann, 2018). Any scientific quest which aims at providing a faithful understanding to human phenomena could lean into the poetic nuances of life, crafting life stories as deeply as possible (Freeman, 2011). In this sense: “narrative analysis, in addition to supporting the customary scientific aim of increasing knowledge and understanding about the human realm, can support the aim of increasing compassion and sympathy, and a sense of connection to others” (Freeman, 2004, p. 14). That is, the quest to develop a poetic psychology, which informs and transforms (Freeman, 2011, 2016), requires an act of humility of researchers, that of acknowledging more consistently the mastery of those who devote their lives to craft words and meanings, which mirror the complex dynamics of human life. Using poetry in qualitative inquiry requires commitment to learning how to write, for which both reading poetry and writing poetry consistently are important (Lahman et al., 2010).

Putting these premises into practice in order to analyze the content and function of cultural elements, cultural psychologists need to locate such artifacts in the sociocultural and dialogical dimensions where intentional agents are addressing specific audiences and unfolding specific values (Zittoun, 2017). However, cultural psychologists or social scientists do not always display an explicit account of the methodological stands which they use to support their argumentative lines for bringing the arts into consideration. Thus, while we as researchers learn how to write, how to become novelists and poets of qualitative inquiry, we can also invite writers to take part in our academic labor and recognizing the value of their works for the everyday life of persons. We might (or not) be able to get in touch with the authors of the pieces of art we are studying, yet we can always embark on dialogues that are grounded in such sense of compassion and empathy as we meet the human condition unfolding along the pages of a masterpiece.

Methodological considerations

Steps onwards and inwards into “The Art of Being Fragile”

The first author of this article read the book “L’ Arte di Essere Fragile (The art of Being Fragile”) in original version (i.e., Italian), and preselected 69 excerpts that summarize the theses and storylines of the book. She also established contact with Alessandro D’Avenia, the writer of the book, and embarked on a brief dialogue with him online. She then translated into English the quotations that were considered for this article. The second author of this article provided a theoretical background as well as he supported the first author in giving shape to the arguments.

On “The Art of Being Fragile.” This book consists of 38 letters that D’Avenia writes in 203 pages to the Italian poet and philosopher Giacomo Leopardi. Written with a courageous and soft tune, this book is a gentle invitation to embrace the existential nuances of life, so heavily described by others. This book is an interlude between a work of art and a work about art. It is an epistolary novel, a poetically inspired text, an act of philosophical inquiry. This piece does what poetic words are called to convey, reconciling and giving contradictory aspects of life an opportunity to coexist and to resemble the beauty within the fragility (Lehmann, 2018). Therefore, we illustrate how to qualitatively analyze a piece of poetic literature, giving account of what makes some pieces of art, such as this, so exemplary for psychology. That being said, we don’t attempt to psychologize the novel in focus, but to provide a perspective on the ways in which psychology can learn from literature so as to understand human experience and existence more faithfully. We chose this book because of its poetic nuances, and because of the multilayered dialogues that D’Avenia engages in throughout. That is, the book in itself is an imaginary dialogue between the author and Leopardi, yet in parallel to that, the author uses the text as a way to have inner dialogues with himself, with God, with his students, and with different persons who have sent him e-mails and letters along the years, inspired by his novels.

Method of analysis. We followed a frame for narrative analysis by which we aimed at unveiling the poetic nuances in the storylines, while also paying attention to the rhetoric and other aspects of a published work (Freeman, 2004). The main storylines which draw in but also defy current theories in cultural psychology are: (a) Poetic Activism: A revolution of the poetics of everyday life; (b) The poetics of human development; (c) The beauty within the fragile as a master; and (d) The intuition of the spirit as an invitation.

Ethical considerations. Using public documents such as books does not require approval from Ethical committees of research in Norway and Denmark. We consulted the author of the book before, during, and after having written this article, and received his feedback on the development of our ideas, as well as the reassurance that he also feels seen and understood in our interpretations. In addition, the translations into English are ours, and our direct quotations fit into less than 15% of the total words of the book.

Exploring the poetic narratives of the book

Poetic activism: A revolution of the poetics of everyday life

In his book, D’Avenia (2016) sheds light on diverse nuances of poetry and in doing so he offers us readers a treatise about life, which makes poetry available and thereafter also necessary for our being-in-the-world and our search for meaning and purpose. At times, the author presents and elaborates upon Leopardi’s poems, yet he also becomes in other pages a theorist of the poetic, a poetically inspired educator. He explains, for instance, that:
Poetry forces us to lower the artificial light, so we turn and see the mutilated and fragile world. Things return to claim their rights, their tenderness, their impurity, their luminous shadow, their fragility. Things and people, their faces, reappear invoking our mercy: preserve us and repair us, despite everything, they repeat “(D’Avenia, 2016, p. 199).
That is, poetry is a key to expand our capacity of being-in-the-world, magnifying our perception of reality and thus enabling a configuration of the self that reaches existential depth. Both reading and writing enhance self-exploration and help us embracing a more flexible and adaptable sense of self (Lehmann, 2018). Then, internalizing the wisdom of poetry is also defying our beliefs, inviting us to revolve, to face resistance with curiosity, and making individual transformations possible as well as supporting societal and historical revolutions. This makes of poetry a deeply political and ethical cultural resource, and cultural psychologists could recognize its place and value for human development more explicitly.

For instance, and as we introduced before, reading poetic literature can expand our capacity for empathy and compassion (Kidd & Castano, 2013). However, in cultural psychology, such “feeling into” the world, others and ourselves, which empathy evokes, needs to be integrated theoretically with that of irreversibility of time, where the dynamics of feelings and their aesthetic quality develop and vanish (Valsiner, 2019). Poetry brings in a vertical dimension to the horizontality of chronological time, which gives a phenomenological room for felt intensities to take place (Lehmann, 2018; 2019). This is what the notion of poetic instants actually evokes, a vertical dimension (Bachelard, 1932/2013). Irreversibility of time is an existential given, and poetry masterfully reconciles the ephemeral with an opportunity of presence (Gumbrecht, 2004), with an expansion of the perception of an instant. This process of value-grasping of some instants over others in chronological time is essential for meaning-making and decision-making (Lehmann, 2019). In this sense, poetry has a crucial function in rendering psychology human, by crafting the reality we study into sensed, felt, and known words that resembles not an objectified version of what is “human,” but the human version of it (Freeman, 2004).

Not in vain, D’Avenia engages in a revolution of the poetic of everyday life. That is, he is not fulfilled by merely reading poetry and learning from poets such as Leopardi, nor does his motivation stop in writing poetic literature. Poetry and other arts do not stop in the solitary journey of creation, but serve as a scenario for political action as well, to give voice to the oppressed, individually or collectively, and thus to transform the world in which we live (Argüello Manresa & Gla˘veanu, 2017; Lordelo, 2017). He engages, we believe, in a labor of rendering our everyday life more poetic. He does so by engaging different activities to spread the power of poetry in social media, in classrooms, in theaters, and thus he is inviting the public, through his poetic activism, to embrace the poetic in their everyday life as well. He thanks once again Leopardi and continues to explain his perspective of poetry:
Thanks for reminding me that imagination is not just something for poets, but of human beings who make poetry from each of their actions. That is, fulfillment: poetry is a faithful love, poetry is a tasty dish, poetry is a passionate explanation. This lesson is useful for me every day at class, when I have to put my imagination in service of the unripe faces of my students, to see the invisible concealing behind their still shapeless being in the world. (D’Avenia, 2016, p. 53)
That is, his book “The Art of Being Fragile” is a treatise of what poetry is, where the writer meets our sense of humanity on the staircase of the labyrinth and makes poetry accessible through his empathy and compassion. D’Avenia supports us, with pedagogical mastery, in our process of feeling into our wounded being and embracing the beauty that exists not necessarily despite fragility, but through it. He is, such as us, an optimist existentialist who befriends poetry as a primary companion in our solitude, that which remains beyond our deepest relationships. Poetry helps us standing contradictions, tensions, questions, and ambiguities in ways in which theories of psychology yearn yet to pronounce. Such a quest to raise poetry’s value for humanity, is an invitation for cultural psychology to also consider the poetic nuances of human development, as we suggest in the next section.

The poetics of human development

Theories of human development are yet to explore profoundly the contexts in which human beings create their lives and mature; comprehensive research in the field requires a more thoughtful interaction between theories and the everyday life of people (Abbey & Bastos, 2014). In the following excerpt, D’Avenia is not only suggesting some stages of human development, but grounding them in as a quest toward values that help us unveil the meaning of life. The existential nuances that he draws in are provoking and inspiring:
The book is thus divided into sections that highlight the steps of human existence and that which can brighten them from within. Leopardi has distilled, as it is done with the ingredients of a perfume, the stages that we all have in common, whatever might it be our longitude or latitude of belonging, and whatever is it the “gift” that life has offered us. I coin these fundamental aspects of the essence of life: adolescence, or the art of hope; maturity, or the art of dying; repair, or the art of being fragile; dying or the art of rebirth. Art is that which the one who has a talent in life (all of us do) can learn and improve day by day, so that every stage of life is enlightened, guided and warmed by a fire that does not vanish, that of the joyful passion of being to the world as poets of the everyday life, instead of exhausted or pale extras. After all we do exclaim, in a moment of joy: “this is pure poetry!” don’t we?” (D’Avenia, 2016, p. 14)
These poetic stages of development are suggesting values to be grasped within the apparent contradictions that are brought into question at those moments of our being, which becomes motivational. D’Avenia invites us to look at life course as a quest to grasp values. Such intention helps us discerning priorities that make decision-making and meaning-making bearable, in the midst of the uncertainty, ambiguity, and ambivalence that characterizes life (Lehmann, 2019). His developmental intuitions invite us psychologists to see human beings as artists, conveying a stroke of beauty to the tensions that are inherent to each of our developmental transitions. Such a movement resembles that of poetic motion, which is a theoretical notion that brings psychology in contact with what is and what could be for the person, evoking imagination as an inherent feature of experience and a crucial aspect of maturing (Abbey, 2007). Interacting with pieces of literature in our everyday lives can support such process, by means of setting the ground of a dialogical imagination, providing us with stories to understand the crossroads between the here-and-now, and the soon-to-be future (Carriere, 2018). Paz (1956/1999) well reminds us that the capacity of embracing poetic instants is universal to human beings, even if few of them – who call themselves poets – put those instants into words. Poetic instants can be described as different milestones or memories in our biographies which make us feel that life is worth living (Lehmann, 2018). This is so due to the emotional arousals that make such moments meaningful, personally and collectively, even if it is challenging to bring this meaningfulness into words (Chaudhary, Chawla, & Sindhu, 2017). It can be a snowfall one watches from bed while listening to Ludovico Einaudi and journaling, and which does not resolve one’s grief, but nuances the beauty of life, including that which one grieves. Poetic experiences alike are crucial for human development for they allow us to move from worlds of things and facts, toward worlds of sense and meaning, which can also support and make life worth living (Zittoun, 2017). And in this quest, D'Avenia invites us to embrace existential nuances, as we explore in the next subsection.

The poetics of development as an existential feature

D’Avenia draws in poetic nuances of human development, highlighting the existential features, which cultural psychology is still to acknowledge theoretically and empirically. He tells us, for instance, that “poetry reaches that interior region of human beings where their fundamental existential orientations are placed, and of which life is dependable” (D’Avenia, 2016, p. 63). Thus, as a cultural resource, poetry becomes a life companion in our search for meaning and purpose, and our development and maturity become then not just a quest to make sense of our experiences, but also to make sense of our existence (Lehmann, 2018). In order to fulfill such a quest, D’Avenia reaches out at Leopardi, the poet, asking him for help:
Help me, Giacomo, to feel fascinated with less fear in this vertigo, which the heart itself causes and knows not how to satisfy, falling then into boredom (…) You sought after refuge in changing house and city, yet the trips during the years after your attempts to escape often made your discouragement worse, rather than soothing it. To travel was not enough. These are obscure moments, in which the song is interrupted, because for writing poetry one needs to believe in the poetry of life, and in order to do so one needs to integrate first such silence and own it: to mature, that is, to die. And to prepare oneself to sing once more, from even deeper dimensions, those beyond notes, with new forms, to give birth and order to the chaos of the night, to the terror of the night of the heart.” (D´Avenia, 2016, pp. 121–122)
These words also meet with Vygotsky’s early writings:
Crises are no temporary phenomena, but inner life’s road. When we pass from systems to fates (pronouncing this word is tarrying and joyful at the same time, knowing that tomorrow we will investigate what is hidden behind it), to the birth and downfall of systems, we see it with our own eyes (…) That is correct. That is true. To develop is to die (…). (Vygotsky, 1931 in van Deer Veer & Valsiner, 1993, p. 16)
However, such existential dimensions of sociocultural theories of human development are still to be pursued. Through philosophical lenses, cultural psychologists and artists look for similar things, and thus, there are possibilities for innovation in cultural psychology, by means of exploring the existential and hermeneutical dimensions of the ways in which human beings engage in meaning-making of the world and themselves (Innis, 2016). Thus:
appropriate cultural studies must integrate individual aspects—be they existential, phenomenological, affective or cognitive. It is my impression that cultural psychology can contribute to expanding the traditional ways of doing psychology when it develops more sophisticated theories of the psychological subject. (Cornejo, 2007, p. 244)
In this chain of thoughts, and reminding that studying poetic experiences can help in writing new pages in the history of psychology (Zittoun, 2017), focusing on the crossroads between poetic experiences, and what poetry does for a society, or for a person, can also support the development of an existential–cultural psychology (Lehmann, 2018). Precisely, a cultural psychology that attempts to understand phenomena such as grief (Brinkmann, et al., 2018), has turned as well toward poetry, for its power to produce presence, for the affective loading that brings in the senses, and that transcend the conventional meanings of words (Gumbrecht, 2004). Poetry matters to our everyday life and our development, because it supports us in making sense of the nonsense of impending finitude, suffering, death, dying, but also because it helps us condensing the depth of an instant and grasp the eternal within the ephemeral. It is the experiencing person who designates something as “poesis,” “poetic,” “poetry,” due to the affective load of such a moment (Zittoun, 2017). These experiences which invites the person to create something that enables them to share or magnify, to trace back such flow of experience into cultural elements, be it artistic or poetic (Zittoun, 2017). Thus, poetry is a gate to address the existential aspects of the life course. In the next section, we reflect upon the connections between poetry and the beauty, and how the art of being fragile is an existential quest, and how poetry may support our work as cultural psychologists.

Beauty within the fragile as a master

Cultural psychology needs to acknowledge more thoroughly that studying emotional intensities and their significance in the everyday life of people surpasses the capacity of language or at least of conventional narratives (Lehmann, 2018). This is precisely one of the core strengths of literature and poetry, the masterful ways in which such pieces of art portray the messy beauty of our life journeys not just by describing it, but making us feeling into it (Freeman, 2004). In addition, poetry brings in the real and the possible, which is also a scenery for cultural psychology and its explorations of higher psychological functions such as creativity and imagination (Klempe & Lehmann, 2017). In doing so, we could bring feelings and emotions at the core of human experience and existence, which is something that cultural psychology has argued theoretically (e.g., Valsiner, 2007) yet struggled to approach empirically. That is, in our everyday lives, poetry supports our process of gaining emotional literacy, as D’Avenia highlights when saying:
Thanks, Giacomo, for giving me words to look into the right places, in the hidden angles, the words for telling myself, for getting to know myself, for being. The words to accept that I am, same as you, a wounded infinite. (D’Avenia, 2016, p. 59)
Research in emotions suggests that emotional literacy gives us a sense of agency, it gives us awareness to detach from experiences and make conscious choices (Greenberg, 2011). Thus, poetry is a great resource for us human beings to expand our repertoire of words to describe emotions, to amplify our perception of nuances in emotions, and therefore, to color our lives with deeper significance. The quest for the beauty, and the fragility of the beauty, helps us making the ephemeral bearable, making our stories a legacy of poetic beginnings, poetic knots, poetic endings. D’Avenia masterfully, once again, gives us an example of how such a quest to praise the beauty within the fragility of life is accomplished:
The world must know the precious and fragile secret that you had discovered in a simple spring, in a simple nocturnal sky, dominated by the moon and the stars. Such as any other who falls in love does not speak of another thing than their love. Actually, in order to renew your captivation, you often looked out the window reaching the night from your desk, after having extinguished the candle. (…) I learnt it from you, Giacomo, how to look at the stars from a window while the sea, mirroring the pure blue of the sky, breaths tireless and tranquil. I learnt from you how to feel a wonder standing above those things that are not made by human beings, and how inspiring that which human beings can make.” (D’Avenia, 2016, p. 17)
Thus, poetic instants are a source for cultural psychology to further study attention as a higher psychological function (Lehmann, 2018), altogether with other processes which have received greater “attention,” such as creativity, memory, or imagination (e.g., Zittoun & Glaveanu, 2018). D’Avenia treates moments of awareness and attention with devotion and indeed Mary Oliver (2016) reminds us also that “Attention is the beginning of devotion” (p. 8). A poetic scientist reminds us as well that such moments that shake us awake into life, enable us to “living a life that is not only attentive and devotionally practiced, but also opening and welcoming” (Freeman, 2014, p. 215). It is possible to train our appreciative and contemplative capacities to grasp poetic instants alike in daily life, and including silent practices (e.g., quiet times, meditation, among others) as part of our routines, can foster such an attentional shifts (Lehmann, 2018).

The intuition of the spirit as an invitation

Perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects of D’Avenia’s (2016) book is the nuances of spirituality that soften within his words. This quest is written as an invitation, the author outstands his perspective, his mode of understanding beauty, his own life. However, neither does he pull Leopardi into the labels of the spiritual nor does he do this with his readers or the people whose letters he also answers in the book. Some sentences of the book unveil a private layer of his identity, leaving the door ajar. For instance, he says: “Melancholy is the door that shuts down towards the room where the divine in us rests. Poetry is the attempt for shaping the key that can open it, without ever falling into despair. Until the last breath!” (D’Avenia, 2016, p. 154). That is, for the author, poetry is also an expression of the spiritual dimension, which does not require us to dive into religious dilemmas, but to consider a metaphysical stance in our ontological understanding of human beings. Even if the notion of the spirit remains a taboo for psychology, and its definition has also changed across history, including cultural psychology as a discipline, it is crucial for us, who devote our careers to study human everyday life, to bring this into a more explicit consideration (Lehmann, 2018). According to Frankl (1946/1985), a spiritual or noetic dimension evokes our resources to become aware, detach, and transcend physical and (or) psychological constraints (e.g., physiological or cognitive symptoms of an illness). Such a dimension could manifest itself especially when we create or experience values (e.g., through art, by loving someone, a god or a cause), as well as in manifesting attitudes of humor or heroism to cope with impending suffering (Frankl, 1946/1985). The crossroads that D’ Avenia’s novel brings into scene, support our considerations for developing a cultural–existential psychology (Lehmann, 2018), efforts which need to be pursued further, and would require elaboration in other publications.

For example, recent research exploring the poetic instants experienced by inhabitants of New Delhi in India has found that some people describe such moments of everyday life as transcendental or spiritual, related to one’s destiny, as if happening for a certain reason (Chaudhary, Chawla, & Sindhu, 2017). Some participants in such research would even highlight how difficult it is to put into words such ineffable experiences. Intuitions for bringing into consideration silence-phenomena in everyday life from the perspective of cultural psychology also acknowledge this ontological dilemma, and the necessity to bring into explicit discussion the notion of the spirit in psychology (Lehmann, 2018). Be it or not related to a spiritual dimension, the significance and role that silent experiences have in everyday life has been ignored in psychology, and need further elaboration.

Another aspect that is unveiled in D’Avenia’s poetic narrative is that of an existential understanding of life’s purpose and man’s search for meaning, which resembles Frankl’s (1946/1985) premises. The following excerpt illustrates this point:
The faithfulness towards one’s own destiny, that not by coincidence, the Greeks called moira, which means “the assigned part”, is the only way of being happy on this earth, and of being happily unhappy when one is not able to feel So. Because the starting point of inspiration which guides us has the ardor to be able to burn obstacles and failures or, as a matter of fact, to find in them a substance to renew the fire.

Even this I owe to you, Giacomo, for helping me seeing, in body and verse, what it means to remain faithful to one’s destiny. To leave aside the conditions in which it will be fulfilled or, better still, accepting such conditions as an occasion, as a substance to accomplish one’s own work of art. (D’Avenia, 2016, p. 86)
These existential questions upon the destiny of a life might clash with some theoretical premises in cultural psychology. However, Vygotsky himself presented intuitions upon the power of culture as a possibility to defy life’s constraints through the freedom of will (Vygotsky, 1934/1994). Cultural psychologists do not need to agree with statements about spirituality, destiny, or freedom of will, but to remain open to explore the cosmologies that embrace these features. This can also lead to an understanding of freedom in accepting circumstances, wherein an attitude toward circumstances makes us free (Frankl, 1946/1985). D’Avenia brings in questions and ideologies that are present in the everyday lives of people, and that affect meaning-making and decision-making in decisive ways. Then one feels that one has a purpose or a destiny, values to be grasped, meanings to be found, the motivational quest that this can represent. He has indeed not invented such a cosmology suggested in his writings, for he teaches literature, Greek and Latin, and has a doctorate in literature as well, and thus the knowledge which he revives in his oeuvre is going back to history of western thought. In suggesting an existential cosmology in the value of poetry for humanity, he then reminds us that:
The only “holistic theory” that human beings possess is poetry. Not poetry in its poetic components, but the poetry, that is, the intuition of “life as a whole”, the feeling of fragility and originality of existence, which asks us to face it with care and courage, even if taking the floor there are pain, defeat, loneliness. Do not ever renounce to poetry, even when it seems like life cannot keep its word, has been your truly heroic act, the biggest act of love that you have accomplished. (D’Avenia, 2016, p. 68)
Such a holistic approach to experience and existence, which aesthetics can convey, resembles also the quest of cultural psychology when theorizing upon psychological processes (Lehmann & Klempe, 2016). The poetic outstands, once more, as a resource that we can use more consistently. The intuitions and arguments that D’Avenia presents, remind us of the motivational power of the arts in our everyday lives, as we pave our biographies with meaning. His words transcend meaning with affirmations that we are alive for we feel. Expanding the depth of our capacity to feel, we are also claiming our worth of being alive. In relation to this, D’Avenia also bridges silence with the poetics, and the spiritual. He praises silence as a quest, which is a field beginning to be explored in cultural psychology (Lehmann, 2018). He says:
The purified chant of the adolescent illusions must remain equidistant to the enchantment and the disenchantment’. This is the time of silence, of the dark night. It resembles such a phase of love in which it the spell that made everything look perfect vanishes. Yet, it is just love asking us to grow and to root more deeply into it, for bearing fruit. This is a fertile time, even if it looks like the contrary. The art of silence is the hardest to learn, as it appears as lacking of the fruits or joy. Few are those who perseverate and taste its pulp. (D’Avenia, 2016, p. 110)
Perhaps, the poetic and po-ethic nuances in the words D’Avenia are also bringing into scene considerations for including a more explicit description of the spirit in cultural psychology. It is not the first time that the existential, the ethical, the axiological, and the spiritual are placed together in the history of philosophy, anthropology, or psychology. Max Scheler is a great example the potential of such an integration, in order to better understand processes of meaning-making, decision-making, and their cultural guidance (Lehmann & Klempe, 2015). Cultural psychology could profit from exploring these arenas in the verses yet to be written in their theories.

Conclusion

In this article, we have explored the possibilities that literature and poetry open up for cultural psychologists and qualitative researchers, taking “The Art of Being Fragile” by Alessandro D’Avenia as an exemplar on how to bow toward the poetic dimensions of experience and existence so as to expand our understanding of human development. This article articulates our attempt to move onwards on the quest to develop a more poetic psychology. Expanding our capacity for compassion and empathy, we can live with curiosity to feel into otherness and the world, and convey meaning to the greatest of our sorrows. This could help us psychologists while doing research and aiming to go to the core of affective processes. Doing so unveils the existential nuances which cultural psychology could acknowledge more consistently in their theories. Such an attempt for doing more compassionate and empathetic research enterprises is also an act of ethical disclosure.

To sum up, there are at least three nuances of human development that D’Avenia touches upon in his book, and which cultural psychology could approach more consistently in their theories: a poetic and dialogical view of human development and activism, an existential view of human development, and, in the crossroads of such poetic and existential intuitions, a spiritual quest. This is what D’Avenia does as a writer, as a teacher, as a poetic activist, and thus we consider him a fellow in our poetic revolution, a revolution of empathy and compassion, a motivational quest for unveiling the fibers of existential meaning that are hidden in each and every one of our hours.

Beyond our attempt of bringing the methodological aspects of using poetic literature as research material, we provided some glimpses for an existential-cultural psychology, which require further extension and future development. Cultural psychology has been resisting to explicitly recognize a spiritual dimension in their ontological understanding of the person, and this is of course a dilemmatic and difficult journey. However, the fact that some researchers do not perceive such a dimension as relevant or existing, does not give them right to deny or undermine the significance of such a dimension for those people who make it part of their development and their search for meaning. The softness with which D’Avenia touches the depth of life calls us further to the exercise of expanding our empathy and compassion, as we presented in the introductory sections of this article. By having illustrated how to conduct a narrative analysis of a book, we hope that our work will intrigue and motivate researchers to read, read, and read, faithful portraits of human experience and existence; and write, write, and write more poetic psychology, which in turn provides more faithful strokes of the landscapes of life. The downside of conducting a narrative analysis of a such a masterpiece is that meaningfulness of the words makes it challenging to narrow down which excerpts to present in the analysis or not. Thus, the ones here presented hopefully provide glimpses of a clear sky, an undeniable invitation to reach out for poetic books such as The Art of Being Fragile, and contemplate the stars and the auroras once standing still in the wonders of the nights of life.

Such an attempt for doing more compassionate and empathetic research enterprises is also an act of ethical disclosure.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We thank Alessandro D’Avenia, for his openness and generosity in receiving our words and our sharing. Thanks also to Mark Freeman for his thoughtful feedback upon a previous version of this article, and to Stella Mililli for double-checking our translations from Italian into English.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biographies

Olga V Lehmann, PhD, is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Mental Health, NTNU Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim. She also leads the Health and Compassionate programs at Pracademy. She is a poetess, teacher, psychologist, and researcher interested in feelings and emotions, silence–phenomena, communication, poetic instants qualitative methods.

Svend Brinkmann PhD, is a professor of psychology in the Department of Communication and Psychology at the University of Aalborg, Denmark, where he serves as a co-director of the Center for Qualitative Studies. His research is particularly concerned with philosophical, moral, and methodological issues in psychology and other human and social sciences. In recent years, he has been studying the impact of psychiatric diagnoses on individuals and society and is now directing the research project The Culture of Grief.

References

Abbey

(2007). Perpetual uncertainty of cultural life: Becoming reality. In Valsiner

Rosa

(Eds.), Cambridge handbook of socio-cultural psychology (pp. 362–372). Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Abbey

Bastos

A. C.

(2014). Creating bridges to the future: The poetic dimension through family life. Culture & Psychology, 20(2), 232–243.

ArgüEllo Manresa

Glăveanu

(2017). Poetry in and for society: Poetic messages, creativity, and social change. In O. V. Lehmann, O. N. Chaudhary, A. C. Bastos, & E. Abbey (Eds.), Poetry and imagined worlds: Creativity and everyday experience (pp. 43–62). London, England: Palgrave Macmillan.

Brinkmann

(2009). Literature as qualitative inquiry the novelist as researcher. Qualitative Inquiry, 15(8), 1376–1394.

Brinkmann

(2012). Qualitative inquiry in everyday life: Working with everyday life materials. London, England: Sage.

Brinkmann

Brescó

Kofod

E. H.

Køster

Overvad

A. T.

Petersen

Winther-Lindqvist

(2018). The presence of grief: Research-based art and arts-based research on grief. Qualitative Inquiry. doi:10.1177/1077800418789443

Carriere

K. R.

(2018). “ We are book eight”: Dialoging the collective imagination through literary fan activism. Culture & Psychology, 24(4), 529–544.

Chaudhary

Chawla

Sindhu

(2017). Apprehending beauty: Ordinary people’s experiences of the “poetic instant” in India. In Lehmann

O. V.

Chaudhary

Bastos

A. C.

Abbey

(Eds.), Poetry and imagined worlds: Creativity and everyday experience (pp. 155–174). London, England: Palgrave Macmillan.

Cornejo

(2007). The locus of subjectivity in cultural studies. Culture & Psychology, 13(2), 243–256.

10.

D’Avenia

(2016). L’Arte di Essere Fragili. Come Leopardi Può Salvarti la Vita. Milano, Italy: Mondadori.

11.

Frankl

V. E.

(1946/1985). Man’s search for meaning. Washington, DC: Washington Square Press.

12.

Freeman

(2004). Data are everywhere: Narrative criticism in the literature of experience. In C. Daiute & C. Lightfoot (Eds.), Narrative analysis (pp. 63–81). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.

13.

Freeman

(2011). Toward poetic science. Integrative Psychological Behavioral Science, 45, 389–396.

14.

Freeman

(2014). The priority of the other. Thinking and living beyond the self. New York: Oxford University Press.

15.

Freeman

(2016). Narrative psychology as science and as art. In J. Valsiner, G. Marsico, N. Chaudhary, T. Sato, & V. Dazzani (Eds.), Psychology as the science of human being. The Yokohama manifesto. Annals of theoretical psychology (Vol. 13, pp. 349–364). New York: Springer.

16.

Greenberg

L. S.

(2011). Theories of psychotherapy. Emotion-focused therapy. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

17.

Gumbrecht

H. U.

(2004). Production of presence. What meaning cannot convey. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

18.

Innis

(2016). Between philosophy and cultural psychology: Pragmatist and semiotic reflections on the thresholds of sense. Culture & Psychology, 22(3), 331–361.

19.

Kidd

D. C.

Castano

(2013). Reading literary fiction improves theory of mind. Science, 342(6156), 377–380.

20.

Klempe

S. H.

Lehmann

O. V.

(2017). Reviving the logic of aesthetics: Poetry and music in cultural psychology. In Wagoner

Awad

Brescò

(Eds.), The psychology of imagination: History, theory and new research horizons (pp. 67–82). Charlotte, NC: IAP.

21.

Lahman

M. K. E.

Geist

M. R.

Rodriguez

K. L.

Graglia

P. E.

Richard

V. M.

Schendel

R. K.

(2010). Poking around poetically: Research, poetry, and trustworthiness. Qualitative Inquiry, 16(1), 39–48.

22.

Leão

M. E. A.

Guimarães

D. S.

(2017). Rimbauding worlds. In Lehmann

O. V.

Chaudhary

O. N.

Bastos

A. C.

Abbey

(Eds.), Poetry and imagined worlds: Creativity and everyday experience (pp. 121–138). London, England: Palgrave Macmillan.

23.

Lehmann

O. V.

(2018). The cultural psychology of silence. Treasuring the poetics of affect at the core of human existence (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). NTNU Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway. Retrieved from https://brage.bibsys.no/xmlui/handle/11250/2484902

24.

Lehmann

O. V.

(2019). The poetic resonance of an instant: Making sense of experience and existence through the emotional value of encounters. In Marsico

Tateo

(Eds.). Ordinary things and their extraordinary meanings (pp. 53–75). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.

25.

Lehmann

O. V.

Brinkmann

(2019). “I’m the one who has written this”: Reciprocity and in writing courses for older adults in Norway. Manuscript submitted for publication.

26.

Lehmann

O. V.

Chaudhary

Abbey

(2017). Conclusive remarks: Writing toward the core—Poetically framing a science of cultural psychology. In Lehmann

O.V.

Chaudhary

Bastos

A. C.

Abbey (Eds.)

, Poetry and imagined worlds (pp. 281–289). London, England: Palgrave McMillan.

27.

Lehmann

O. V.

Chaudhary

Bastos

A. C.

Abbey

(2017). Poetry and imagined worlds. London, England: Palgrave McMillan.

28.

Lehmann

O. V.

Klempe

S. H.

(2015). Psychology and the notion of the spirit: Implications of Max Scheler’s anthropological philosophy in theory of psychology. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 49(3), 478–484.

29.

Lehmann

O. V.

Klempe

S. H.

(2016). The centrality of aesthetics for psychology: Sciences and arts united through poetic instants. In J. Valsiner, G. Marsico, N. Chaudhary, T. Sato, & V. Dazzani (Eds.), Psychology as a science of human being: The Yokohama manifesto. Annals of theoretical psychology (Vol. 13, pp. 51–66). London, England: Springer.

30.

Lehmann

O. V.

Klempe

S. H.

(2017). The tune without the words. Dickinson’s verses in a Jazz Ensamble—A case study on the poetics of music and the musicality of poetry. In O. V. Lehmann, N. Chaudhary, A. C. Bastos, & E. Abbey (Eds.), Poetry and imagined worlds (pp. 175–195). London, England: Palgrave MacMillan.

31.

Lordelo

(2017). The poetics within performance art: The developmental nature of artistic creative processes. In O. V. Lehmann, O. N. Chaudhary, A. C. Bastos, & E. Abbey (Eds.), Poetry and imagined worlds: Creativity and everyday experience (pp. 63–80). London, England: Palgrave Macmillan.

32.

Moghaddam

F. M.

(2004). From ‘psychology in literature’ to ‘psychology is literature’: An exploration of boundaries and relationships. Theory & Psychology, 14(4), 505–525.

33.

Oliver

(2016). Upstream. Selected essays. New York, NY: Penguin.

34.

Paz

(1956/1999). El Arco y la lira. Barcelona, Spain: Galaxia-Gutemberg.

35.

Schulz

Monin

(2018). Suffering and compassion in older adult caregiving relationship. In T. Boll, D. Ferring, & J. Valsiner (Eds.), Cultures of care in aging (pp. 213–242). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.

36.

Stuckey

H. L.

Nobel

(2010). The connection between art, healing, and public health: A review of current literature. American Journal of Public Health, 100(2), 254–263.

37.

Valsiner

(2007). Culture in minds and societies. New Delhi, India: Sage.

38.

Valsiner

(2014). Invitation to cultural psychology. London, England: Sage.

39.

Valsiner

(2015). The place for synthesis: Vygotsky’s analysis of affective generalization. History of the Human Sciences, 28(2), 93–102.

40.

Valsiner

(2019). Hyper-generalization by the human mind. The role of sign hierarchies in meaning-making processes/Hans-Kilian-Preis 2017. Bochum, Germany: Psychosozial-Verlag.

41.

Vygotsky

(1925/1971). The psychology of art. London, England: The M.I.T Press.

42.

Vygotsky

(1934/1994). The problem of environment. In van der Veer

Valsiner

(Eds.), The Vygotsky reader (pp. 338–354). Oxford: Blackwell.

43.

Zittoun

(2017). The concern for poesis and imagination. In O. V. Lehmann, O. N. Chaudhary, A. C. Bastos, & E. Abbey (Eds.), Poetry and imagined worlds: Creativity and everyday experience (pp. 81–95). London, England: Palgrave Macmillan.

44.

Zittoun

Glaveanu

(Eds.). (2018). Handbook of imagination and culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.