Note on Freud and Blake

Blake's Prophetic Books are renowned for their extreme obscurity. In his own days they were regarded as the wild outpourings of a madman. Blake himself regarded them, however, as his chief life's work, and one of the finest letters ever written is that written by Blake to Butts, in which he gives his reasons for wishing to leave Felpham and Hayley's patronage—he found that remaining there impeded him in composing the Prophetic Books. While he uses the extreme language of a visionary, at the same time he is so calm and business-like; he weighs up the probable result of leaving Felpham and returning to London with such precision, he knows it will mean more struggle and poverty, of which he has already had experience in full, and yet in face of that he calmly assesses the force of his inner urge which he eels he must obey.

In face of that letter it would be merely ridiculous to dismiss the Prophetic Books as meaningless rhapsodies. It is true they are still almost impossible to unravel, but the key to them may lie hidden in the future.

I venture to suggest that Freud's speculations in Beyond the Pleasure Principle present a parallel to some of Blake's imaginings.

Freud says he has observed in children and neurotics a repetition-compulsion which in the normal adult loses its ascendency, but which he suggests inheres as a primal part of every instinct. This further leads to the assumption that all animate matter existed once as inanimate matter, to which it has an indomitable desire to return. The Will-to-live, the Will-to-power and the sexual instinct, though they appear to contradict this assumption, are only part impulses and, in fact, ultimately lead to the same goal—death—only by a prolonged route. Without that prolongation, it may be that the primal cell would not discharge all its energy and therefore not die fully. The main idea is, however, that in all living things there exists a protest against life itself—the lust of death is for ever in conflict with th