Synopses & Reviews
The Vale of Soul-Making promises to become the text for post-Kleinian thought.. and the upshot of it all is to establish Mrs Klein as the first 'post-Kleinian'.-- Donald MeltzerPoets have always seen themselves as inspired by their Muse. In this book this is taken literally, not just metaphorically, to be a faithful description of an internal identification with a teaching object or deity that governs the adventure of writing the poem. The central concern of the book is therefore the relationship of each individual poet with his Muse, as worked out on the pulses through the expressive qualities of poetic language. The awesome qualities of the internal Muse were discovered by Melanie Klein in the combined object, and developed into a theory of knowledge by Wilfred Bion and Donald Meltzer, who have shown how learning from experience occurs by repeatedly confronting the aesthetic conflict evoked by the internal object at points of catastrophic change in mental evolution.The impelling nature of the quest for knowledge of the inner world prompted Keats to describe the world as a vale of soul-making, teeming with opportunities for mental growth under the guidance of internal mediators. The self-analysis of Keats and other poets by incorporating poetic qualities into their own evolving Muse provides a fascinating model of development through influence in a way that illuminates the complexity of identification in psychoanalysis, a process at whose core Meltzer locates the counter-transference dream.
Synopsis
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-transference dream" (as Meltzer put 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 psycho-analytic 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.