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This original contribution to the genre of biography by an American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst applies psychoanalytic concepts to the life and artistic work of this most gifted poet. The book opens with an anecdote from Coleridge's boyhood in which, provoked beyond reason, he tries to stab his handsome brother, Frank, and is only spared from committing fratricide by the timely intervention of their horrified mother. The incident forms the leitmotif of Coleridge's stormy, chaotic life: the story of Cain and Abel.
The Coleridge ‘tribe’ included ten children of which Samuel was the youngest. His evident precocity ensured the devotion of his elderly father, a vicar and schoolmaster whom Coleridge adored. The sudden death of his father within the same year as Frank's tragic suicide are further factors which underlie Coleridge's lifelong search for a reparative liaison with another man, a pattern he was to repeat in various forms until his death from opium addiction.
The best-documented of Coleridge's deeply dependent relationships, apart from his torturous marriage, is his tragic friendship with William Wordsworth. Weissman demonstrates through an intricate interpretation of Coleridge's dreams, and detailed explication of his poetic imagery, that their idealistic interdependence was based on unconscious homosexual wishes, in the broadest sense, with profoundly masochistic tendencies in Coleridge's. Weissman's contention that Wordsworth, while apparently seeking desparately to rescue Coleridge from the debilitating effects of opium, actually hastened his addiction, is a radically new viewpoint.
The book is unusual for the deftly sensitive handling of a most complex relationship which was actually mutually inspirational and joyful for both men until soured by neurotic envy and paranoia.
What will be of particular interest to clinicians and students alike is the author's theoretical hypothesis on the psychology of the artist and the nature of the creative process. Simply pu