The Vale of Soulmaking The Post-Kleinian Model of the Mind and Its Poetic Origins

• Main Author: Williams, Meg Harris
• Format: eBook
• Language: English
• Published: London Routledge 2005; New York Karnac
• Edition: 1
• Subjects: English literature; History and criticism; Psychoanalysis and literature; Oedipus Tyrannos; Fanny Brawne; Young Man; Elfin Grot; Unpremeditated Verse; objects; God Fathered; La Belle Dame Sans; Green Knight; La Belle; lost; Fingal's Cave; God Mother; Combined Object; Arthurian Epic; Wild Wild Eyes; Paradise Lost; Miltonic Inversion; Green Chapel; Rack Dislimns; Meg Harris Williams; Verbal Cut; ode; Countertransference Dream; Aesthetic Conflict; Nativity Ode; Feminine Muse; Milton's Lycidas; Cold Hill Side; paradise; combined
• ISBN: 9781855753105; 1855753103
• DOI: 10.4324/9780429483677

The post-Kleinian model of the mind, as developed by W. R. Bion and Donald Meltzer, is essentially an aesthetic one. It is founded on Melanie Klein's discovery of the "internal object" with its combined masculine and feminine qualities and ambiguous, awe-inspiring nature. Turbulent emotional experiences are repeatedly transformed through symbol-formation, on the basis of the internal relationship between the infant self and its object; and the aesthetic containment provided by this "counter-transfer-ence dream" (as Meltzer terms it) enables the mind to digest its conflicts and develop. This search for a pattern that can make "contrary" emotions thinkable is modelled by all art forms and accounts for their universal significance. It is a process that can be observed particularly clearly in literature, in the form of the romance between the poet and his Muse (the traditional formulation of the psychoanalytic internal object). This book explores the "counter-transference dreams" of some of the inspired symbol-makers who have been most influential in forming the modern aesthetic perspective in psychoanalytic thinking, including Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Homer and Sophocles. It concludes with a discussion of Bion's autobiographical works, which are the final expression of his own conception of the aesthetic model.