It could be said that William Shakespeare should be remembered as a prominent
psychologist, as the beauty of his sonnets brings poetry into the realm of our
investigation tools in human psychology. It is the affective subtlety of poetic tools
that give promise for our scientific investigations. The theory of Presentational Self
outlined in this book has everything to do with poetry—even if there is no direct
poetry in the meticulous coverage of everyday interaction events that Koji Komatsu
presents. Yet I would claim that poetic expression is the ultimate example of the
Presentational Self—something in the poet’s current relation with the ambience
triggers, and that something “bursts out” from the interior infinities of the person
into the interpersonal realm of a poem, a song, a dance, or a painting. The roots of
such outbursts are in the person <> environment continuous, relating within the flow
of experience. So also are its outcomes.