There are few biographical subjects as interesting to the psychiatrist as Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Although many versions of Coleridge's biography have been written, this new endeavor is very welcome; its emphasis is different from that of its predecessors.

Most of these biographies have emphasized the extraordinary degree of learning displayed by Coleridge. He was constantly looking for evidence in the products of the intellect for the signs of God's workings in the universe. His religious views were unstable and shifting during his lifetime, but he ultimately settled into a conventional ordination. He knew so much as to be able to captivate people by his sparkling intellect, and his lectures enraptured large throngs. He coined numerous terms that remain in our dictionaries, but it is his psychiatric terminology that is fascinating. He not only produced such words as psychoanalysis and psychosomatic, but he also spoke of “Impotence — Painful Sensation