Patterns: Building Blocks of Experience

Various tributaries of psychoanalytic and developmental theory have flowed into our understanding of the role of early sensory and affective experiences in the construction of our personal worlds. This work traces how such primary experiences coalesce into patterns. Through pattern, Marilyn Charles holds, we approach elusive meanings through dimensions of shape, contour, and affective resonance. Such patterned understandings, in turn, become a mode of interchange through which we touch one another in ways that go beyond the overtly physical. Analytic patients, Charles finds, have often led early lives too full of "noise" to use their early sensory and affective experiences constructively. Charles illustrates the tight interweaving of patterned experience and creativity by examining the poetry of Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich, each of whom, used the medium of poetry to give verbal form to primary sensory and affective experiences.