blake and freud - poetry and depth psychology

Blake and Freud: Poetry and Depth PsychologyAuthor(s): Daniel Majdiak and Brian WilkieReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Jul., 1972), pp. 87-98Published by: University of Illinois PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3331395 .Accessed: 23/01/2012 13:40

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Blake and Freud: Poetry and Depth Psychology

DANIEL MAJDIAK and BRIAN WILKIE

Rollo May has spoken for many of his colleagues in arguing that Freud's ideas grew out of the intellectual and historical context of the nineteenth

century and must be understood in that perspective.1 Although we do not wish either to support or to deny that argument, we would like to show one strikingly full anticipation of psychoanalytic theory in a poet who lived a hundred years before Freud. The poet is William Blake

(1757-1827). Freud himself suggested that his concepts were anticipated in such nineteenth-century thinkers as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and even Kant, and the elements of their thought in Freud's work have been discussed ably. But the imaginative embodiment of nineteenth-century depth psychology in Romantic literature has not been given its due.

Blake was a professional engraver and painter as well as a poet, and almost all his published literary works are intricate combinations of his own pictures, designs, and words, of great power both verbally and pic- torially. These works are complex and difficult, but in recent years much

progress has been made in understanding them, and no one today doubts that in both pictures and poetic text a searching symbolism is at work.

Blake's message is expressed in a myth, largely of his own invention, of four Zoas, or life forces, who are part of every human being. The

myth operates on the levels of religion, politics, and history, but above

DANIEL MAJDIAK is an assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and specializes in English Romantic literature and the modern period. He has published articles on John Barth, Saul Bellow, and Iris Murdoch. BRIAN WILKIE is a professor of English at the University of Illinois and the author of Romantic Poets and Epic Tradition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965) and essays on Wordsworth, Byron, Blake, and literary theory. He is currently working on an interpretation of Blake's The Four Zoas.

Rollo May, Love and Will (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), p. 24.

88 DANIEL MAJDIAK and BRIAN WILKIE

all it is a psychology, an attempt to describe the sources of the civil war that afflicts man's psyche, the dynamics of that war in the mental world where most of us live, and the way to resolve the conflict. Blake's myth probably comes closer than any other work in English literature to being a complete psychiatry. Freudian and Jungian literary critics have been fascinated with it, and, as R. D. Laing has pointed out, it can be read with profit by practicing psychoanalysts as well.2 It conveys not just the facts of man's division against himself but also the terrors of that state and its tragic, unnecessary wastefulness.

The myth of the Zoas did not reach its fullest form until Blake wrote Vala; or The Four Zoas (a poem he left in manuscript but drew on for the later poems Milton and Jerusalem). There the Zoas are identified as Urizen; Luvah, who in "fallen" existence appears as Orc; Urthona, whose fallen and more usual name is Los; and Tharmas. (By "fallen existence" Blake means the state of inner psychic conflict and mental illness that we all know.) Roughly speaking, Urizen ("your reason") is the human intellect, which in the healthy or unfallen man is faith and

certainty but when fallen is the dry, sterile logic and legalism that are all too familiar in political, religious, military, and academic life. The rigidity of Urizen's values is captured by Blake in the title page he

composed for his Book of Urizen (Figure 1) ;3 the Zoa depicted there is a white-haired old man, a compulsively scribbling scholar and lawyer, the principle of the tyrannic state, the threatening sky-God of the reli- gions, the spirit of Newtonian science satanically whispering to man of his littleness, the "horizon" that limits sight and experience, the bogey- man of punishment with which the neurotic frightens himself (Blake sometimes calls Urizen "Old Nobodaddy"), in short, the super-ego. (See Figure 2, from Blake's Europe.) Urizen's opposite number is Luvah, who as the sound of his name implies is human love or passion, the

2 R. D. Laing, The Divided Self (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1966), p. 162. 3 Of the seven original copies of The Book of Urizen that are known, six were

done by Blake by a special method of color-printing, using opaque pigments, which he invented himself. The other (Rosenwald) copy, on which the Trianon Press facsimile used here was based, was done by Blake by his more usual method: he etched the text and the basic outline of his pictorial design on a metal plate, then printed it in colored ink, and then finished by hand, in water colors, each page of each copy. The coloring often differs dramatically from one copy of a Blake poem to another. The Trianon Press facsimile series, which is so faithful that some people think that "forgery" would be a better word than "facsimile," was produced by collotype printing in colored ink followed by the hand-coloring of each page of each facsimile copy. The hand-coloring was made possible by the use of a multitude of stencils for each page, each stencil designed for the application of a particular color, the colors being discriminated with great precision and subtlety. The Trianon Press method is virtually unique in the history of art publishing.

BLAKE AND FREUD: POETRY AND DEPTH PSYCHOLOGY 89

Figure 1. Title page of William Blake's The Book of Urizen. The overrigid symmetry of the picture reflects Blake's view of the restrictions imposed by law, conscience, super-ego. Library of Congress, Rosenwald Collection.


Figure 2. William Blake, Europe, frontispiece. Urizen as suprahuman geometer God. Blake Trust-Trianon Press.


force of Eros. In the fallen world he appears as Orc, a flaming adoles- cent youth who with total irreverence, violence, and irresponsibility threatens everything the rigid Urizen stands for.

Urthona, or Los, is man's creative or imaginative impulse. Ultimately in the myth he is to become Blake's redeeming hero, by restoring to man his capacity to image the world in a healthy way. (In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake writes, "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.") But for a while Los is just as benighted as the other Zoas. Tharmas, the fourth Zoa, is harder to understand than the others, but he seems to represent instinct in man, the mortar that binds together the elements of the psyche. In the fallen state Tharmas expresses the terrified recognition that man is in chaos. He is a kind of early warning system in man that scents disaster, and conversely the possibility of reintegration, before either heart or mind becomes fully aware of what is happening. He is also the human body, but in a special sense - not the passionate Luvah-body of writers like D. H. Lawrence but the body that a child senses in himself and that tells him infallibly and directly of his happiness or the opposite.

The myth in The Four Zoas assigns the blame for man's psychic division to all four of the Zoas, more especially to Urizen and Luvah, but this long work is sometimes confusing and - since Blake never really finished it - at times inconsistent. A shorter, simpler, and clearer account of the fall appears in the earlier Book of Urizen (1794). Here the fault, or at least the original fault, is squarely Urizen's. It is in this work that Blake's anticipation of psychoanalytic concepts is most visible. After giving an account of the action as Blake presents it we will attempt to draw the Freudian parallels.

At the beginning of the poem Urizen retreats from his brother Zoas (or "Eternals," as they are called in Urizen) into a condition of isolated abstraction from which he returns to proclaim his primacy over the others - in short, he claims that he is God, the only faculty in man that deserves to rule. He also uses the occasion to promulgate his newly written laws, like Jehovah on Mount Sinai or like any lawgiver who thinks that the infinite variety of human beings should be reduced to controlled uniformity. His laws are well meant; they enjoin peace, love, unity, pity, compassion, and forgiveness; the super-ego has the very best of intentions and principles. But still they are laws - not recognitions of the precious uniqueness of individual people but attempts to put a straitjacket on the human psyche: "Let each choose one habitation, / His ancient infinite mansion, / One command, one joy, one desire, /


One curse, one weight, one measure, / One King, one God, one Law." For Blake the cardinal sin, indeed the only sin, is to "hinder" another

person, and that is what Urizen is up to here. He violates what Blake considers the basic premise of freedom: "One law for the lion and the ox is oppression."

The other Eterals sense with terror the imminent psychic fragmen- tation of the human being, and in reaction they commission Los as a kind of quarantine officer to protect them against Urizen's unprece- dented threat. Thus, unwittingly, they secede from human unity as Urizen has done in his way; man cannot retain his wholeness without the intellect. Los does not like his assignment, he howls and groans over its necessity, but as human imagination he does what he has to do. He is by trade a blacksmith, and so he forges in his smithy the human

body that we all wear- the fallen body that catches colds, suffers deafness, cannot fly. But that body is also our salvation, for even our

decrepit and limited bodily senses can retain for us our link with our real

possibilities. He makes for Urizen a body through which, however in-

adequately, he can sniff fragrance and hear melody and see color. Man has fallen, but a limit to his fall has been set; the senses are only half alive, but they are still functioning.

Los now becomes discouraged; he drops his hammer and his fires

cool, for fallen imagination now thinks it has betrayed its trust to keep man whole. Los's body divides, as Adam's does in Genesis, and the first female, called Enitharmon, is born. A new kind of psychic dis-

integration has now taken place: the sexual division and warfare, in-

volving selfishness on both sides, in which women and men think of themselves as mutual enemies determined to dominate or conquer. But sexual attraction has also been bor, and from it results the union of Los and Enitharmon which produces their son Orc. Enitharmon nurses him and he grows to adolescence, at which stage his parents, like Abra- ham and Sarah with Isaac, or Jocasta and Laius with Oedipus, decide to sacrifice him to destruction. The Oedipus complex has come into existence, not to mention the generation gap. In Blake's illustration (Figure 3) one of the links in the chain of jealousy that grows each night from Los's breast coincides very nearly with the father's sexual organ. Both as visual artist and as poet Blake shows himself to have anticipated ideas that Freud was to articulate a hundred years later.

There is more to that concentrated psychological poem The Book of Urizen, but this much of a summary will be enough for our purposes in this essay. We turn now to the psychoanalytic parallels.


Figure 3. From William Blake, The Book of Urizen. Los and Enitharmon with their son Orc; the "Chain of Jealousy" grows from Los's breast. Blake's depiction of the Oedipus situation. Library of Congress, Rosenwald Collection.


Blake's view of the dynamics of the human personality can be summed up, very nearly, in a single statement of his: "Without contraries is no progression." That is, for Blake as for Freud the central fact regarding human character is conflict; both men believe such conflict is necessary in order for the self to take form. As noted earlier, the poem opens with Urizen, Blake's version of the super-ego, sundering himself from the Eternals, the other components of the psyche. By calling them Eternals Blake suggests very nearly what Freud does when he states that in the unconscious a state of timelessness prevails. The simultaneous sense of reality and of time appears only in the consciousness, and it is exactly that world of consciousness which Urizen brings into being in his act of secession. In his later attempts to describe the psyche Blake came to think of the unconscious more as Jung pictured it, as "all that consciousness can become" (to quote Philip Rieff),4 but in Urizen he is still close to Freud's conception of it as irrational will striving to gratify its instincts, a striving that Blake suggests when he makes the other Eternals accessories in creating the psychic disorder which allows Uri- zen, super-ego, to become dominant.

As in Freud's conception of the super-ego, Urizen is a power of con- straint, what Blake calls the "unprolific," and he can see the Eternals (id) only as a threat. He seeks "for a joy without pain, / For a solid without fluctuation," a condition of stasis which conflicts directly with Blake's creed that without contraries is no progression. Urizen perceives the energy of the Eternals as "unquenchable burnings," but to him such burnings are not symptoms of vital energy but merely chaotic and de- structive. Predictably, his way of counteracting the strivings of the Eternals is to create "books form'd of metals" in which he writes the arcane "secrets of wisdom," the rules of the censor. These rules, as we have seen, exact a rigid conformity to one moral code: "One King, one God, one Law." In Urizen is incarnated Freud's idea of the super-ego as a tyrant ruling through moral principles. The reaction of the Eternals is characteristic of the id: "Rage, fury, . . . And enormous forms of energy, / . . . Sund'ring, dark'ning, thund'ring, / Rent away . . . / Eternity roll'd wide apart."

What follows next is a remarkably close parallel to Freud's description of the way in which the components of the psyche come into being as separate, warring principles. Philip Rieff summarizes the process ex- cellently: "The ego is but an outer portion of the id - crystallizing in-

Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (New York: Doubleday, 1961), p. 37.


dependently as soon as the infant becomes aware of a physical world different from the self. Then, onto this acceptance of reality lodged in the perceptual system, are superimposed the exhortations of society,... the super-ego. It follows that the super-ego is part of the ego; threaten the former, and the latter is involved, in its own defense."5 This is almost precisely what occurs in The Book of Urizen when Urizen becomes aware of his newly created reality, except that, as Blake imagines it, the ego takes its distinctive form in response to the developing super-ego. At first Urizen is helpless, infantile, and he regresses to a womblike state: "And a roof vast, petrific around / On all sides he fram'd, like a womb." (See Figure 4.)

Then the imaginative shaper Los, Blake's version of the ego, appears, sent by the Etemals, as if crystallized from their essence, to keep watch over Urizen. The role of Los is precisely that envisioned by Freud for the ego: Los must mediate between the Eternals and Urizen, between id and super-ego, in their civil war. (Freud frequently uses military meta- phors to describe psychic conflict.) Like the ego in Freud, Los is weak, sometimes desperate, always struggling to control the deadly antagonists between whom he finds himself: "Los wept, howling ... / And cursing his lot; for in anguish / Urizen was rent from his side." In the neurotic state, the relationship of ego to super-ego is always problematical; the super-ego is truly alien to the ego, but it can and frequently does dominate it. This is what happens in The Book of Urizen. Los, in effect, responds to the crisis of the super-ego and creates for it a reality principle within which it can securely function; he creates the limits of space and time. "He watch'd in shudd'ring fear / . .. and bound every change / With rivets of iron and brass" to create the solid reality of mass by which we perceive space. "And tur'd restless the tongs, and the hammer / Incessant beat, forging chains new and new, / Numb'ring with links hours, days and years."

Blake believed that this reality principle must be overcome. In The Book of Urizen there is no suggestion that this can be done, though such a solution is described in Blake's later and longer versions of the myth, where Los comes to mean more than the Freudian ego we have been outlining here. In The Book of Urizen the Zoa of reason continues to dominate, and it is owing to his domination that the Oedipus complex, as Blake understands it, becomes a major factor in psychic life. Here again Blake differs from Freud in particulars, in that Freud thinks of the super-ego as succeeding the Oedipus complex in the development of

6 Ibid., p. 64.


Figure 4. From William Blake, The Book of Urizen. Urizen in the fetal position under the hammerblows of the blacksmith Los. Library of Congress, Rosenwald Collection.

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character, but in the main outlines the two men are in perfect agree- ment. In his anguish for what he wrongly thinks is the death of Urizen, Los creates a female counterpart for himself, evidently attempting to

replace that part of him which he imagines to have died with Urizen. For Blake this event signals another regression; in his self-division Los

lapses into a nearly psychotic state in which he suffers continual depres- sion of the deepest kind. There is no exact parallel to this in Freudian thought, though the event does illustrate Freud's concept of ambiva- lence, the ever-present possibility of reversibility and regression.

At any rate, Blake's system is mythical, not empirical, and we need not try to find a correlate to every event in his action. What is impor- tant here is the result of Los's creation of a counterpart. The Freudian view of sexuality is explicit from the start: "He embrac'd her; she wept, she refus'd; / In perverse and cruel delight / She fled from his arms, yet he follow'd." As we have explained, the son of their union is Orc -

probably from Latin Orcus, hell. Los's reaction to the boy is a classic

example of the Oedipus complex (as Figure 3 so well shows), but looked at in terms of the father's role in it, an approach which is con- sistent with the fact that Urizen dominates in this world. Urizen is the "father of Jealousy," and the close connection of the super-ego and ego as Blake dramatizes them is again demonstrated in Los's Urizenic be- havior toward his son. "O sorrow and pain! / A tight'ning girdle grew / Around his bosom.... These falling down on the rock / Into an iron chain / In each other link by link lock'd. / They took Orc to the top of a mountain.... They chain'd his young limbs to the rock / With the chain of jealousy / Beneath Urizen's deathful shadow." The parallel to the story of Oedipus is so abundantly clear that it need not be dwelt on.

What is worth noting, however, is that where Blake departs from Freud on the nature of the Oedipus complex Blake shows himself to be more free of his time than Freud was. The authority structure itself was

essentially the same for both men, but their attitudes toward it were

radically different. Freud accepted the paternalistic authority structure of his world and reflected it in his own attitudes toward his female

patients, as current advocates of Women's Liberation like to remind us. But Freud's acceptance of the father's authority goes even deeper, for he tends to think of the Oedipus complex as the child's problem, a problem that only the child must adjust or accommodate himself to. Freud never speaks of Laius and his complicity in the events that are so fatal for Oedipus. But that is exactly what Blake does. He analyzes the com-


plex in a way that points to a more complete view of its origins, taking into account the psychic problems of the originators of the family and its reality. The result, however, is the same in Blake as in Freud: an endless cycle of aggression and repression, the hell fire of repressed libido, continually breaks out in rebellion which keeps the psychic life in a constant state of convulsion. We are left at the end of The Book of Urizen with the same somber view of the embattled self that emerges from the work of Freud.

blake and freud - poetry and depth psychology

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