NEUROCOGNITIVE FACTORS OF POETRY THERAPY IN WAR TIME

Abstract

The article stresses on artistic creativity of authors, namely, Ukrainian poet-combatants, and readers of their works as bibliotherapy aimed at post-traumatic recovery and maintaining a person’s psychological hardiness.

The study purpose was to analyze hermeneutically the used figurative-symbolic means that represent via values and temporal attitudes a person’s experience, including various neurocognitive factors (sensory modalities) existing in the work of Ukrainian poet-combatants, primarily Pavlo Vyshebaba and an anonymous author, writing under Facebook nickname, Anatoliy Anatoliy.

The study results evidences that kinesthetic and visual neuropsychological factors influence in different ways on re-working, application and perception of personal experience developed due to traumatic situations during the war. The kinesthetic sensory experience can be based either on visual images having a gray-black-blue coloristic palette and representing the female intuitive function of making sense about the present, or on images with light tonality (white-yellow) representing the male function of goal-setting and outlining distant prospects of state-building and personal development (the future). It is argued that the basis of the ability to poetic creativity, as well as the aesthetic response to it by readers, lies in synesthesia - a neuropsychic phenomenon in which irritation in one sensory or cognitive system leads to an automatic, involuntary response in another sensory system. Synesthesia is the result of the interaction of sensations arising in different analyzers.