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In an author's note to Blake’s Job: Adventures in Becoming, Jason Wright tells us the story of how he came to leave a theatre career after suffering a spinal injury in a car accident at the age of 28. Not long afterwards, he began to train as a psychotherapist, having discovered an interest in the works of C. G. Jung and William Blake. Then, in the 1990s, as a result of a strange encounter in Bloomsbury, he was able to make a complete series of picture slides from a copy of Blake's Illustrations of the Book of Job, taken from the original 19th C etched plates. These images have informed much of Wright's therapeutic work and thinking since then. They are the core of this marvellous and complex book that will be a resource to psychotherapy and psychoanalytic practitioners alike, as well as all those interested in William Blake's contribution regarding addictive and repetitive states of mind and body.
Illustrations of the Book of Job was Blake's final completed work before he died in 1827. It offers the clearest rendition of his mythological system leading to expanded spiritual perception. At the core of this system is the human struggle between Human Imagination and an inner accusatory voice that Blake had a number of names for: ‘Satan’, ‘Error’, ‘Eternal Death’, ‘one-fold vision’. This is a mental state of great omnipotence that is relationally and spiritually blind. Blake was plagued by this inner state for a great deal of his life. He knew that it daily crucified imaginative life. He used the archetypal story of Job to demonstrate the transformative journey that can lead us out of ‘Error’ and ‘Eternal Death’ into the expanded perceptual experience of ‘Eternal Life’ or ‘four-fold vision’.
Wright brings Blake's visionary insights into the 21st century, demonstrating their continual relevance in dealing with the traumas of human experience, the conflictual nature of our inner worlds and humanity's increasingly mindless treatment of planetary resources. At the beginning