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Writers about Blake—and they are many, as anyone who looks at Bentley and Nurmi's Blake bibliography will know—find him a fine vehicle for their own interests and associations, rather as if he provided them with a literary Rorschach kit. The advantage of this to Jungians reading The unholy Bible is that Dr Singer's interests are those of a Zürich-trained analytical psychologist (now practising in Chicago). Using her Jungian theory as her base, she relates the material of Blake's major prose-poems and poetry not only to the events and relationships of his personal and external life, but also to his painful and profound search for the self through tumultuous encounters with the collective elements within him.
Esther Harding in her introduction to the book says, ‘It is more than a critique or even an interpretation of Blake. It carries his ideas on into the psychological realm and makes his profound insight accessible to the modern reader, whether his interests are literary or psychological.’ I found it difficult to know what sort of person I, a modern reader of The unholy Bible, was supposed to be—whether sophisticated, knowledgeable, ignorant, emotional, naïve—or perhaps more realistically, all at once.
The exhortation in the first sentence of the text is, ‘Read William Blake's “The marriage of heaven and hell” with your uninhibited feelings as well as your intellect, and you will know why the author tells us that at the end of life heaven and hell are joined….Opposites which struggled within the spirit of man while he walked the earth are united now in one vast paroxysm….’; and then we go immediately into the next paragraph beginning, ‘We have few documented facts concerning those days in Blake's troubled life….’
This curious stylistic unevenness runs throughout the book. At each stage, details of Blake's life, his marriage, work and experiences, are summarized and linked more or less smoothly in with the material which forms the bulk of the contents: an analysis of Bl