The psychological foundations of literary creation from the point of view of Ezzedin Ismael

Ezeddin Ismael is one of the critiques who is renowned to have a cognitive psychologically oriented approach in the contemporary Arab literary criticism and to have a special place. His most important work in this field is the book "al-tafsir al-nafsi leladab". His studies have been conducted in three domains: literary analysis, artist's personality analysis, and the study of the process of creating literary work. Given the fact that today the effective psychological foundations of the literary creativity process as well as the psychoanalytic analysis of literary personality are of the essence in the literary criticism studies, it is necessary to scrutinize the views held by Ezeddin Ismael as both a critique and as an authoritative pundit in this realm. Therefore, this research aimed at probing the views of Ezeddin Ismael through a descriptive-analytical lens. Moreover, it aimed to investigate the following questions: from his perspective, to what extent the psychostimulants affect the literary creativity? What roles the psychoanalytic analysis of the literary person play in his view? The results of this study unveiled that using cognitive psychology in the critique of literary works, he has come to believe that although some of the psychological stimuli such as neurosis, narcissism, intelligence and insanity—to some extent—contribute to the creation of literary works, their impacts seem to be infinitesimal. Notwithstanding, in his opinion, the analysis of the character of Adib contributes to the understanding of literary work as such that for instance analyzing the psychoanalysis of the character of the ancient Arab poets, we can elicit or discern some of the weaknesses or shortcomings of the literary genre of drama in the ancient Arabic literature.