Evidently, I began using ‘psychal’ in mid-March, 2011 because I wanted a correlate of my term ‘mindality’ and which was to be associable with phenomenological interest, differing from standard “psychological” (scientized) interest.
Like “mind” and “mindality,” what is “psychology” about, “psyche”? Is “the” psyche the same as mind? Sociology is about what’s “social,” so psychology is about what’s psychal? Our lexical inheritance is not very fine-grained, given the tangibility of life that language originally served. … I want to distinguish psychal interest from psychological interest. Psychal interest in mind or psyche is experiential (or phenomenological). Psychological interest in mind is methodic, structural, or conceptual. Poetic venturing may be essentially psychal. Literary psychology is about a general character of such venturing. {from § 6 of “sweet transgression,” March 19, 2011]Next day:
My sense of psychalness is phenomenological, but a holism of that pertains more to a theory of appreciation or artistry of experience than to especially “psychological” inquiry (which, of course, interests me immensely). Yet, especially interesting to me—no surprise—is the textual phenomenon (which I eccentrically anticipated last year). So, I’m coining a notion of psychality with a textuality of phenomena in mind, i.e., regarding all experience inasmuch as it may be regarded as interpretive, taking to heart the figural frame of “reading” experience. {from ¶ 1.2 of “a validating frame of mind,” Mar. 20]Afterward, I used the notion without reference to the March discussions (e.g., May 5, 2011 on “a sense of Self…”), and focused on the term in 2017: “scaffolding psychality.”
