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Connections

No. 1 (2024)

Federico García Lorca: Play and Theory of the Duende Between Poetics and Psychoanalysis

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3280/gruoa1-2024oa22696
Submitted
aprile 29, 2026
Published
2026-05-13

Abstract

oltre i confini della razionalità, convocando ciò che è oscuro e non ordinario per produrre cambiamento e nuove forme di pensiero The article analyzes Federico García Lorca’s thought through his lecture Play and Theory of the Duende, establishing a dialogue between Lorca’s poetics and psychoanalysis, particularly the ideas of Enrique Pichon-Rivière, founder of operative psychoanalysis. The duende, a dark and ineffable force emerging from the depths and from the tension between life and death, is presented as an aesthetic and anthropological principle rooted in the body and the unconscious, capable of generating artistic creation. The author highlights analogies between the duende and psychoanalytic concepts such as emergent and uncanny, emphasizing the artist’s role as bearer of the collective unconscious and agent of transformation. The text retraces Lorca’s biography, his cultural activism with La Barraca, his travels in the Americas, and the symbolic complexity of his work (moon, horse, bull, colors), marked by cultural syncretism. Like the ineffable in psychoanalysis, the duende escapes logic and manifests in inner struggle, openness to otherness, and the ability to name what has not yet been named. This leads to a reflection on the link between poetic language and the analytic process: both aim to transform experience creatively, beyond rational boundaries, summoning what is dark and non-ordinary to produce change and new forms of thought

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