Reality, “Fiction” and Psychorealising the Fictive

Readers of literature, listeners of music, appreciators of visual art – indeed, all recipients or “audiences” in any form of the creative and performance arts – do sometimes connect with the artistic work on a deeply personal and subjective level when the work strikes a relatable chord in them. Audiences tend to find themselves and their everyday reality mirrored, or “placeable,” in the work’s creative or enacted reality. This subjective experience has been termed “Psychofictive Reality”. This article proposes this concept through the prism of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic concepts of Internal/External Realities and Aristotle’s dramatic notion of Catharsis. It establishes key notions such as Artistic Reality, Psychic-Material Reality and Mirrorness/Relatability, in the concept of Psychofictive Reality.