Search

Kafka read Freud and was interested in psychoanalysis but believed there was no ‘cure’ for what was essentially the problem of living. As always with creative artists, the writer is his own psychoanalyst, and the actual process of writing is his means of self-revelation. The aim of this paper is to consider, in relation to two stories (The Metamorphosis and A Country Doctor), Kafka’s use of this background oedipal conflict with his father or received values (the ‘law’) as a springboard for the type of wound that results in creative writing. The wound for him became a kind of personal myth, and was also associated with other painful stimuli, including his tuberculosis and his troubled love affairs, but above all with his identity as a writer. The writing process and the ‘faith-value’ it demands is an underlying metaphor behind these narratives of Kafka’s ‘dream-like inner life’. There are parallels here with Bion’s psychoanalytic philosophy of ‘suffering’ and ‘psyche-lodgement’.

This paper discusses the meaning of psychoanalytic faith as a useful developmental concept, which applies to the therapeutic process in the consulting room as to other intimate educational experiences. Faith is a concept which has been little considered in relation to psychoanalysis, partly owing to semantic confusion with ‘the Faith’ as in religious or psychoanalytic dogma, and partly owing to the difficulty of defining or describing what it is, outside accepted jargon. Yet, faith is traditionally the gateway to experiencing the unknown – a psychoanalytic goal-demanding negative capability. It is suggested that philosophy and poetry, where the concept is more familiar, can provide psychoanalytic parallels for this particular type of learning from experience. The viewpoints of Bion, Meltzer and Kierkegaard are taken as contributing to a picture of how, in the psychoanalytic session, there may be a developmental encounter between the infant (patient) and the infinite (the transference process, rather than ...

The injunction at the end of King Lear to ‘speak what we feel, not what we ought to say’ appears almost too easily said, by contrast with the tempestuous emotionality of the play as a whole. This article considers the role of poetic language and poetic structure in defining an essentially nonverbal or preverbal quest for identity, taking Lear and Gloucester to be the children who are father to the man. They represent complementary aspects of the baby or young child who is struggling to internalise its mother upon weaning and achieve a mode of symbol-formation. ‘The true voice of feeling’ is a quotation from Keats differentiating ‘true’ from ‘false’ art, and the baby's struggle is related to the poet's.

This paper takes Bion's question ‘What sort of artists can we be?’ and begins the quest for an answer. In the light of the later aesthetic model posited by Bion and Meltzer, I consider first the nature and properties of symbols as containers for meaning, then the problem of how symbols are formed and metabolized by means of the transference–countertransference. Finally attention is drawn to the musical resonances of the ‘countertransference dream’ which have traditionally been overshadowed by verbal and visual considerations.

Bion saw science, art and religion as vertices of knowledge or‘devotion to the truth’that were equally important to psychoanalysis and that needed to be brought into fruitful communication. This paper considers their complementary qualities, in the context of the later thinking of Bion and of some recent lectures by Meltzer on Bion's theory of thinking, which include his second thoughts about the Grid. In particular I want to pay some attention to the‘neglected’religious vertex (as Bion saw it), and to the function of cruelty in it, something which Meltzer has suggested arises inherently from the countertransference situation in the context of symbol-formation.1

The aim of this paper is to enable the psychoanalytic reader to make an enriched emotional contact with Homer's ancient epic which, in recounting the story of Odysseus’journey homeward after the confusions of the Trojan war, demonstrates the evolution of a new ethics based on communication between the internal objects of the protagonists. Athena plays a facilitating role in adjusting the relationship of father and son, husband and wife. The reading is guided by the internal poetic structure, under the aegis of a post-Kleinian perspective on the reading process which has a clinical analogy.

The intention of this paper is to focus attention on the nature and value of inspiration as a function of particular importance in all aesthetic work, including psychoanalysis; and to indicate its analogous importance in personality development. Following the poets - the most expressive analysts of inspiration - inspiration is described as a mental process rather than a quality. This paper does not rely solely on mere statements about inspiration. Rather, features of the concept of inspiration are drawn from the aesthetic language of several poets: in particular, Dante, Keats, Milton, Emily Bronte, Plato. Finally, some more explicit links are made to the context of current psychoanalytic theory.

Literature is recognised as having significantly influenced the development of modern psychoanalytic thought. In recent years psychoanalysis has drawn increasingly on the literary and artistic traditions of western culture and moved away from its original medical–scientific context. Originally published in 1991 The Chamber of Maiden Thought (Keats's metaphor for 'the awakening of the thinking principle') is an original and revealing exploration of the seminal role of literature in forming the modern psychoanalytic model of the mind.The crux of the 'post-Kleinian' psychoanalytic view of personality development lies in the internal relations between the self and the mind's 'objects'. Meg Harris Williams and Margot Waddell show that these relations have their origins in the drama of identifications which we can see played out metaphorically and figuratively in literature, which presents the self-creative process in aesthetic terms. They argue that psychoanalysis is a true child of literature rather than merely the interpreter or explainer of literature, illustrating this with some examples from clinical experience, but drawing above all on close scrutiny of the dynamic mental processes presented in the work of Shakespeare, Milton, the Romantic poets, Emily Bronte and George Eliot.The Chamber of Maiden Thought will encourage psychoanalytic workers to respond to the influence of literature in exploring symbolic mental processes. By bringing psychoanalysis into creative conjunction with the arts, it enables practitioners to tap a cultural potential whose insights into the human mind are of immense value.

This paper traces the psychological implications of Sophocles’ treatment of the Oedipus legend, in the light of Bion's concept of‘catastrophic change’ and Keats's of ‘negative capability’. The first-written play, Antigone, concludes with the curse of revenge which falls when the mind-city fails to integrate conflicting emotions. The hero of Oedipus Tyrannos, however, overcomes the mindless pessimism which would deflect him from self-knowledge, by means of a necessary weaning process founded on memories of infancy. Finally, Oedipus at Colonus shows how mental beauty or poetry metamorphoses from the appearance of ugliness and makes ideas transmissible.

f',I K E most forms of youthful play, the Bronte juvenilia served an important heuristic function for its players. The vast imaginary world which the Bronte children created out of the cramped reality of Haworth Parsonage was at once a playground and a workshop, a land where the aspiring young artists could begin to work through problems, at once psychological and vocational, which would concern them for the rest of their lives. In writings which focussed so often on chaos-from war and political rebellion to the disintegration of families-we can trace a constant preoccupation with the idea of literary form, with the structural conflicts involved in the process of writing itself.' Melodie Monahan, in her edition of Charlotte Bront6's The Poetaster, points out that in this miniature Jonsonian play, "Bront6's emphasis is ... on esthetics, on defining great lit