LANÇAMENTOS

The romantic poets and psychoanalysis: the religion of the mind¹

Os poetas românticos e a psicanálise: a religião da mente

Meg Harris Williams

London. megwill@gmail.com

Bion said the Romantics were the first psychoanalysts (echoing Freud but more emphatically). In what senses is this true? For clearly, if by psychoanalysis, or proto-psychoanalysis, we mean man's investigation of his spiritual condition, that is something that goes back to the very origins of humanity in a variety of mythic-religious forms of expression.

There is the model of the mind, and the method of investigation. Probably we can say that is genuinely new about psychoanalysis is the method of using the transference between two people, with its specific setting; although of course this has origins and parallels with many previous cultural and religious contexts.

Rather than talk about the method, therefore, I will summarise here the features of the model of the mind that existed in some poetic-philosophical-theological form before psychoanalysis as a method and a profession became established. In the early days of psychoanalysis, indeed, this Romantic artistic model was lost or submerged beneath the Freudian neurophysiological model, but (Meltzer points out) that from the emergence of Freud's structural model, followed by Klein's geographic-theological model, this began to change, and the full implications of the Romantic model began to find their place within the psychoanalytic model, albeit with different terminology.

In the Romantic period, poetry was the ultimate container for contemporary ideas about the mind and its religious nature, which was beginning to be seen as internalised, at least in its most adult or advanced form.

Shelley declared in his Apology for Poetry that 'poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world'. Bion says the same thing when he asserts the value of the 'fresh fiery brilliance of truth the "generators" did not know because it hadn't happened - when they wrote it' (Memoir - also in Bad Job). Traditionally, it is agreed that poetry can contain more truth than what is merely paraphraseable in everyday language. Subsequent generations find new implications, or new ways to paraphrase parts of the truth in their own contemporary language. But the deep contact with psychic evolution exists inside the structure of the poetic language whether or not it has been 'discovered' and put into more limited but explicable terms by readers from a new age.

For Bion, the 'life of ideas' was not just a metaphor: ideas really do have a life history, passing through generations, taking root in various individuals or cultures, where they manifest themselves in different forms. It is the same within the individual as within the history of humanity as a whole: ideas can live, or be killed, and Bion stresses, that is 'not a metaphor only'. But if they are killed in one area, Bion believes, they can go underground, maybe disappear for periods of time, and then re-emerge in a different individual or a different culture. This is one way of seeing the link between the poets and psychoanalysis: the central idea of psychic evolution, or mental growth, was dominant in Romantic philosophy, then went underground, and re-emerged in post-Freudian psychoanalysis. This central idea was in a way obscured by Freudian theory but nonetheless it worked its way in the living relationships established by the psychoanalytic method (at least, this is Meltzer's view of Freud as discoverer of the transference - vs. Freud as pseudo-scientific theoretician).

So what the truth-generators' did not know because it hadn't happened - when they wrote it' refers to this underlying truth of psychic evolution, with which the poets have special contact. They did not foresee the literal historical existence of psychoanalysis but they knew, intuitively, the principles on which the new method would be based, and these had their own contemporary manifestation in poetry. In poetry these ideas can 'speak for themselves', they do not require commentary: they communicate through beauty and energy or 'gusto' as Hazlitt put it - dismissing established morality.

What are these principles or ideas?

I will look at contributions from some of the major poets, in order to remind us of their familiarity with some of the important concepts that later found their way into psychoanalysis: concepts such as negative capability (unknowing); omnipotence vs. dependence on a higher object; the value of mental pain; self-imprisonment in hell or the claustrum; the spiritual impact of beauty; the primary of the mother-baby relationship over and above paternal regulation; the continual struggles of a split personality with its angelic potential and its diabolic temptations; and above all the stress on mental evolution as the ultimate good, replacing the upholding of any fixed or established morality - an individual search for identity which happens through an organic endoskeleton rather than a mechanical exoskeleton.

But first of all there is the concept of the mind itself. The idea could not re-emerge without Klein's vision of the mind as its 'own place' as Milton would say - a spatial and geographical vision in which the relation between the self and God, or internal objects, had room to play out in a dramatic and complex way. Although Wordsworth maintained that he would be the first to make the 'mind of man' his avowed subject, he forgot that Milton, father of the Romantic poets, had already established this 150 years earlier - though without the revolutionary emphasis on the mother-baby relationship that infuses Wordsworth's vision.

However in terms of the religion of the mind, it is to Milton that the modern use of the term 'mind' can be attributed - not just the term, but the focus on the mind as a fitting subject for poetry, in fact the main reason for poetry's existence.

For the mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

Moreover, at the same time, Milton puts these words in the mouth of Satan, playing devil's advocate. He knew well that any revolution (Fall from Heaven) that put the mind first, rather than God's rule-book, could easily be abused and make a hell of heaven. Milton begins his journey beyond Chaos and into the further recesses of the mind by invoking the 'heavenly Muse' who has the power to open to view 'things invisible to mortal sight' - the internal world. This was the great adventure that he called Paradise Lost and that ends with his version of Shakespeare's 'brave new world' when our 'first parents' relinquish their orderly Garden of Eden and journey into a world of work, trial and turbulence, but potentially rich and fertile, where with happiness can never be guaranteed but can be struggled towards.

The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.

These beautiful words at the end of his epic surely mark the signpost to the beginnings of psychoanalysis.

I am not going to speak about Shakespeare here, who as everyone acknowledges, knew all there is to know about human nature. But Shakespeare's personality and conflicts are not apparent in the same way as Milton's, and somehow this subjective struggle is necessary for psychoanalysis to exist as a cultural phenomenon, to be clearly needed by humanity. Indeed Coleridge took Milton and Shakespeare as prime examples of two complementary types of genius. Where Shakespeare 'projects his mind out of his particular being' and enters states of mind that in a sense do not belong to him, Milton is more easily to identify with as an individual, since the struggles are clearly his own and the drama is all gathered inside his own mind. We identify in a sibling way. Shakespeare's mind 'becomes that which it meditates on'; Milton's mind meditates on itself, in the guise of other characters and stories; and in psychoanalysis, we are like Milton, using the transference to read our own inner conflicts. Shakespeare's character may have been far from perfect but his genius was too great. Psychoanalysis exists because of the ease with which heaven and hell can be confused by the individual in a situation of trial - and Shakespeare didn't need it.

Moreover it was Milton who put the aesthetic conflict at the heart of individual struggle: the 'hateful siege of contraries' that Satan enviously felt when he first encountered the beauty of God's new babies, Adam and Eve, viewing them 'with wonder' and almost with love - but this is too painful for the one who has been ejected and substituted, the first or fallen baby who is no longer the favourite.

The Romantic poets all had an intense love-hate relationship with Milton, a genuine aesthetic conflict of the sort that lies behind any mental evolution. I will summarise the philosophy of three of these 'first psychoanalysts' - Blake, Coleridge and Keats. To take them chronologically, beginning with William Blake at the end of the 18^th century:

William Blake

Blake reinforced Milton's idea of the mind as a place of its own, an ever-expanding world:

I rest not from my great Task,
To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes
Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought, into Eternity
Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination.

For him this was the meaning of godhead: an internal family of the imagination. It is internal, since 'all deities reside in the human breast' and in that space 'fairy hands' go to work and create imaginary - that is, real - dramas on family lines. This internal work of imagination contrasts with invention or allegory, a story invented by the 'selfhood' as Blake terms it. In psychoanalytic terms, it is the difference between omnipotence and object-dependency.

For Blake man's wickedness was essentially a problem of perception: he lacks inward vision, appreciation of the inner space of imagination where the psychic work is conducted on our behalf by those internal objects. (Called by Milton 'things invisible to mortal sight' - often quoted by Bion.) Man is self-imprisoned in his claustrum, unable to see that (as Meltzer would say) the door is always open:

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would
appear to man as it is, infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro'
narrow chinks of his cavern.

For Blake, reality is the 'infinite', and contact is prevented only by self-enclosure. The infinite is equivalent to Bion's 'O'. To see things as they really are, man needs to remove the barriers to his self-knowledge - the 'mote in the eye' as in the Biblical story. Thus the world is not a vale of tears when it is properly perceived; but to make this true for humanity in general, vision needs to be clarified by everyone.

Blake also believed in the holiness of passion (the opposite of the conventional religious view). Emotionality is the foundation of truth and goodness, and lack of emotion the basis for evil and un-reality - a view that only reappeared in psychoanalytic theory in the work of Bion with his distinction between lhk and minus lhk, positive and negative emotional links. Blake saw man's task as to build a 'house for the passions', to 'organise' their 'inward form' - as in the container-contained model of symbol-formation where the symbol evolves in response to the emotional conflicts and harmoniously captures it in a containing shape where it can be seen and understood. It is the factor of understanding, of seeing the whole conflict, that makes the movement aesthetic - even if the emotions are painful or hateful in themselves.

Coleridge

Blake distinguished between two types of memory that tended to result in two types of symbol: imaginative memory, which is exploratory, and allegory, which is of fixed meaning that is omnipotently controlled. We could call this knowing vs. knowing about (in Bion's distinction), and it corresponds to the modern emphasis on the here-and-now of the transference experience, rather than viewing psychoanalysis as dredging up past traumas: the abandonment of memory and desire for constructive 're-membering' (Bion). It is indeed a very ancient distinction between knowledge - which is external and informative - and wisdom which is internal and character-building, the result of learning from experience. Coleridge too thought it was 'a strange assertion, that the Essence of Identity lies in recollective Consciousness.' According to Coleridge an idea can only be contained in a symbol, and 'every idea is living, productive, partaking of infinity' and 'contains an endless power of semination'. That is, ideas are the result of creative imagination, and they seed themselves in other minds, perpetually creating new ideas.

Meltzer has also written about the distinction between symbol and allegory, using his reading of the aesthetic philosophy of Cassirer and Langer (itself founded on Coleridge). In essence symbol-making belongs to the dream world of unconscious phantasy, in communication with internal objects, whereas allegory is a type of code language used by the conscious or omnipotent self. It codifies what is already known but cannot teach the personality anything new. As Coleridge says, ideas are not just 'regulative' (like morality) but 'constitutive' - they become embedded in our mind's constitution or structure and the way it grows and develops. They are never static. He called this his 'progressive' philosophy - meaning, not just advanced in itself, but actually about progression. It is the constructive way to deal with our ignorance: 'Our Ignorance with all the intermediates of obscurity is the condition of our ever-increasing Knowledge.' Ideas make the mind 'awake and step forward'.

Coleridge expanded on symbol and allegory in his famous formulations about organic and mechanical types of fantasy, and 'imagination' vs. 'fancy'. Fancy deals in 'fixities and definites' whereas imagination connects the mind with the Platonic source of ideas - the realms of Bion's 'O'. He wrote:

The form is mechanic when on any given material we impress a pre-determined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material. ... The organic form, on the other hand, is innate; it shapes as it develops itself from within, and the fullness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form. Such is the life, such the form.

This is resurrected in Bion's 'endoskeleton' vs. 'exoskeleton'. The mind that develops from within is following the analogy with the endoskeletonous body; if it seeks external protection in a way that imprisons the growing spirit, and uses knowledge in this exoskeletonal way, it will result in Blake's 'cavern' of self-imprisonment and non-perception.

Coleridge, it has been said, coined the very term psycho-analysis. Certainly it was Coleridge who focused on the term consciousness and expanded its implications into the modern meaning or meanings. By consciousness we mean knowing-with-the-mind, whether this is envisioned in terms of levels or perspectives or timings. It is a word that retains a vestige of its original 'conscience', the superego relationship.

The meeting of Coleridge and Keats

Interestingly, it was Coleridge whom Keats referred when he formulated Negative Capability - not as an example of it, but as an example of not having it. He felt Coleridge was one of those who could not rest content with half-knowledge. It is amusing to read the background to this concept in Keats's account of a meeting with Coleridge one day on a walk on Hampstead Heath in London, to see the impact of the topics perpetually swirling around in the mind of the older man:

In those two miles he broached a thousand things - let me see if I can give you a list - Nightingales, Poetry - on poetical sensation - metaphysics - different genera and species of dreams - nightmare a dream accompanied by a sense of touch - single and double touch - a dream related - first and second consciousness - monsters - the Kraken - mermaids - Southey believes in them - Southey's belief too much diluted - a ghost story - 'Good morning' - I heard his voice as he came toward me

I heard it as he moved away - I had heard it all the interval - if it may be called so. He was civil enough to ask me to call on him at Highgate. (letter of April 11 1819 to George and Georgiana Keats)

Here was stream-of-consciousness in action a hundred years before Joyce or Woolf (admittedly, Sterne was practising it even earlier). The poets shook hands and parted. So great was Coleridge's self-absorption that he recalled the meeting as having lasted only a few minutes; all he could say was 'There was death in that hand' - but not before Keats had metabolized Coleridge's free associations into the poetry of the Odes.

With his characteristically light touch Keats gives a vivid indication of the nature of the topics continually agitating and coalescing in Coleridge's mind, and of the impact of his conversational teaching mode. And despite Keats's light criticism of Coleridge's lack of negative capability, this concept does in fact echo Coleridge's own distinction in his Biographia Literaria between two types of 'men of genius' - the man of 'commanding genius' who projectively organizes other faculties or people, and the man of 'absolute genius' who introjects and assimilates experience in a more passive, less omnipotent way. Essentially this is the concept of introjective versus projective identification, operating in a life context.

For in that spring of 1819 noted for its innumerable nightingales, Keats - despite his bemusement - did find Coleridge a kind of nightingale, and during the next few weeks wrote not only the 'Belle Dame' but all his great Odes (apart from 'Autumn'), including the one in which the nightingale's throbbing song, though no longer audible, is imagined as potentially singing in the next valley-glades. He was the antithesis of the kind of listener who would make Coleridge's voice 'die away at once'. Coleridge responded to Keats's receptivity, and Keats continued to listen to his voice as it faded beyond the Vale of Health, transforming its content within his own poem. The beginnings of psychoanalysis indeed - rooted in a sort of transference relationship in which it is the younger man who is the analyst performing the alpha-function needed to give form to this primary chaos of swirling part-objects - Coleridge however had a name for the process, the 'shaping spirit of imagination'. Meltzer describes the analyst's observation as being 'on the alert for movement of the quarry, part-object minimal movements which with patience can be seen to form a pattern of incipient meaning 'cast before'.

The triumphant breakthrough for Keats-as self-analyst came with his 'Ode to Psyche' in which the poet's internal muse is discovered in the combined-object form of Cupid and Psyche, and instated as the mind's true deity:

Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane
In some untrodden region of my mind,
Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,
Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind:

It is the new religion of the mind, rich with unknown 'untrodden' areas of experience. The poem culminates in a picture of the mind as a fertile garden set in a wild landscape, 'the wreath'd trellis of a working brain', with the poet as priest in a baby-mother relationship to the Muse, the 'pale-mouth'd prophet dreaming'.

Keats gathers together the overall picture in his formulation of the 'vale of soulmaking':

There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions - but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. ... As various as the lives of men are - so various become their souls, and thus does God make individual beings, souls, identical souls of the sparks of his own essence.

It is the mystery of individual identity that is also at the heart of psychoanalysis - in Bion's definition, an activity designed to 'introduce the individual to himself, for that is a marriage that will last as long as he lives'. It is formed by internal object relationships (the soul and God) in a context of learning from experience. This is the Romantic vision of evolution or progressive consciousness, organic rather than mechanic, guided by the imagined world of a 'terra incognita' beyond the horizons of existing consciousness. And in post-Kleinian thinking, with its aesthetic and epistemological orientations founded on internal object relations, this is also the new goal of psychoanalysis.

1 Brasilian seminar for Ide, November 2021.