기형도 시에 나타난 도시인의 방어기제 연구

Abstract

In GI Hyeong-do’s Poetry, the poetic self appears as a weak human being daunted before huge urbanism. In the face of inscrutable and unfamiliar urbanism, he uses a defense mechanism to escape psychological discomfort. He reveals obsessional repetition to keep going back to Seoul and leaving it where he has experienced psychological trauma, a quarantine mechanism about topophobia towards the buildings dominated by urbanism, and also a regression mechanism towards the past for the anonymity and indifference of crowds. Despite all these defense mechanisms, however, the poetic self fails to escape from the city and repeats urban life patterns. The city that appears in GI Hyeong-do’s poems is not only a matter of the poetic self’s objective environment and conditions but is associated with the way the poet’s senses and perceptions are revealed, that is, the representation system of the work. GI Hyeong-do captures and reproduces the defense mechanism that is found in urban people when they are at stake due to the harshness of the city and indifference about each other. This is a unique way of reading the text of a city found in GI Hyeong-do’s poems. Therefore, it makes us far from the essence of his poems to understand the unique rhetoric of his poems at the personal level of the poetic self. When we approach his works in association with the urbanism of ‘Seoul’ he is in, we can get closer to the essence of them. GI Hyeong-do’s poems depict the inner side of human beings who have become lethargic being exposed to urbanism, and it belongs to not just a particular individual but all of us who are going through urbanism. It is expected that this study will serve as a starting point to understand humans’ complex psychological responses to the city.