Psychoanalýza ohně – Bachelard Gaston (2025)

In the essay, the author reflects on a number of prompts from his earlier work, The Formation of the Scientific Spirit, while transitioning from the realm of knowledge to poetry. In a distinctive psychoanalytic interpretation of dreaming by the fire, he arrives at an outline of his philosophy of the poetic image, which he then develops in the book Water and Dreams. If Bachelard's Psychoanalysis of Fire remains a captivating read to this day, it is primarily because this small book is imbued with the wonder with which the author discovered his new great task. This task was precisely the exploration of what he wanted to discard, that which Spinoza referred to as 'the arrangement of our imagination.' Bachelard suddenly realized that the stubborn tendency of thought towards subjective distortion of reality might say more about humanity than the few objective truths that lay by the wayside. What was meant to be a warning suddenly became an extraordinarily significant testimony to the functioning of the human spirit.

'If we connect the fire that enlivens our hearts with the fire that enlivens the world,' Bachelard says at one point in his book, 'we will likely be seized by such a strong and primal feeling of belonging with things that precise criticism will become powerless.' Moreover, Bachelard now realizes that it is precisely these intoxicating subjective valuations of the material...