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Martha Harris, to whom this book is fittingly dedicated, was among the first to see how the topography of the depressive position, as mapped out by Melanie Klein and some of her followers, had unexpectedly re-discovered, and from a quite breath-taking angle, the life in imagination that Coleridge and Keats in particular had described almost two hundred years before. Psychoanalysis, the authors inform the reader, is ‘the true child of literature’.
Placing the imaginative at the core of human understanding has widespread implications. It reforms social anthropology, theology and philosophy, as well as psychoanalysis, into a single discipline, concerning itself with mind as poetic.
The original model for this understanding is to be found in the living out of the oceanic, often dangerous and awesome Shakespearean experience. It is in Shakespeare, with whom the authors begin and in whom they find their framework, that a realisation of the imagination, brought from wild Platonic shores, ramifies into the uses of language as a modality of dreaming, in which the words of inspiration are indistinguishable from the elements of dream; it is at this moment that the English find their identity as pirates and unruly colonialists transformed into another equally hazardous manner of voyaging by way of ‘strange seas of thought’ as Wordsworth memorably called it at the end of his life.
Shakespeare is more a culture or climate than a hero of the imagination; conceivably, he is like the dream function itself. The authors discover their actual highrisk heroes in Milton and the Romantic poets, some of whom foundered terribly.
In a letter of 1818, Keats wrote:
The difference of high Sensations with and without knowledge appears to be this - in the latter case we are falling continually ten thousand fathoms deep and being blown up again without wings and with all [the] horror of a bare shouldered Creature - in the former case, our shoulders are fledge, and we go thro' the same air and space wit