Thymophor in Dreams,Poetry,Art and Memory: Emotion Translated into Imagery as a Basic Element of Human Creativity

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 article 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 article 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 picture-metaphor 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.