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“In what sense can the shaping of personality be considered art?” asks Meg Harris Williams in the preface to her recent book. Her work performs a response to this question as she explores her own lineage with the post-Kleinian analysts and their philosophical fellows in her reading of diverse literary texts from ancient to modern times. Seeking the truth of one's own becoming is emphasized as an inherently poetic process throughout the book. This undercurrent theme finds its philosophical course through John Keats' negative capability, S⊘ren Kierkegaard's faith, and Wilfred Bion's the unknown.
Harris Williams interweaves an organic net of literary, philosophical, and psychoanalytic concepts and examples, in search of an aesthetic organization of the psyche toward selfhood. She stresses the role of curiosity-to-know as one of the driving forces in seeking one's psychic truth, as portrayed in the tragic hero's self-quest in ancient drama. For instance, the representations of the tragic hero's conflict in Aristotle and Keats are analytically described as the variants of Klein's epistemophilic drive, rooted in the ambivalence between love and hate felt toward the early objects. One may be inclined to ask in what sense, given the discontinuities within their histories, these concepts parallel one another; but Harris Williams promptly confronts the question and demonstrates through literature that each concept in