The Unconscious Identification Words-Milk

Dr. Edmund Bergler has made several important contributions to the psychoanalysis of writers based on his clinical experience. (1) Of the various theories which he has put forward, one concerns the assumption, already hinted at by Freud, that writers are highly narcissistic. Bergler has elaborated this point by describing what he calls the writer's attempt to establish an “autarchic fantasy”. This fantasy involves a regression to the oral level, as noted by Brill, and the attempt to exclude the giving mother and her breast by the fantasy that the writer gives himself words-milk. This unconscious identification of words-milk can be documented with literary as well as clinical evidence, and it is to a consideration of some examples of this sort that I wish to devote this paper.

The identification of words-milk, or in its most general significance as the infant probably distinguishes it: sounds-liquid, finds expression in phrases describing the poetic process in almost every poet in the European tradition. Such, for example, are the common idioms “a flood of words”, “fluent speech”, etc. In poetry more elaborate images frequently depend upon the mythological fact that the Greeks made the Muses goddesses of poetry and the arts who lived on mountains such as Helicon or Parnassus and guarded sacred springs such as Castalia, Aganippe, or Pieria. It was the liquid from these springs which inspired the poets and thus the myth admirably supports the theory that poetry stems from an oral level of the unconscious. The Muses may be taken as pre-genital mother symbols. The mountains as breast symbols and the springs as milk which issues from the breast. Incidentally the prescribed offering to the Muses was milk and honey. Moreover, it should not be supposed that because this myth is very old that later poets used it unmeaningfully. Great poets are always quick to discard