Orpha and Creativity-Alda Merini: Poet of Trauma

My study is inspired by the clinical and meta-psychological contributions of Sándor Ferenczi, an underexplored voice, in the psychoanalytic understanding of creative processes. Ferenczi discusses fragmentation and reconstruction in the realm of creativity, and the creative reconstructive power of Orpha (Ferenczi, 1932a), a force against psychic death, following traumatic experience. To illustrate the creative process, I refer to the discourse on trauma and creativity, in the diary of the Italian poet Alda Merini (1986), fuelled by her post-traumatic narrative of her history of physical, psychological and sexual abuse. Literature here serves as a psychic space and a base for reconstruction in and after the transition to a new broken existence.