Chapter 13 Milton’s Destructive Narcissist or Blake’s True Self?

If we take Freud’s suggestion that we treat metaphysics as metapsychology even further and apply it to metatheology, William Blake would recommend himself as the voice of subjectivism, which today finds expression in self-psychology and the advocacy of the authentic, and in which the pathological risk is seen to be false compliance with a powerful object. Milton, on the other hand, speaks for those who would seek salvation from relations with the ‘good object’ and see destructive narcissism as the impediment to that union. The primacy of love-that is, the belief that God is love personified-unites Blake and Milton; where the divine is to be found is what divides them. They also differ as to the source of truth; for Milton it comes from God in his heaven, for Blake it comes from within the divine self. Blake saw the worship of something entirely separate from the self as folly and the source of evil; Milton saw the worship of the self as the source of sin. For Blake, Nobodaddy, the lawgiving sky-God, did not exist but was the creation of human illusion and the real source of sin (Keynes 1959:171). In Milton’s account it was Satan, the personification of self-regard, envy and pride, who came between God and mankind (Milton 1975). In terms more familiar in psychoanalysis, Blake saw human problems as arising from disregard of our ideal true selves (the divine image) in favour of seeking a dependent relationship with a false ideal object (the God of the Church), while Milton saw the human

downfall as arising from the. opposition of our narcissism (Satan) to our worship of our ideal object (God).

Blake is in sympathy with the character Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, and he argues that all Satan has done by defying God is to escape from humiliating servitude. The angel Abdiel, on the other hand, speaking for Milton in Paradise Lost, says to Satan that there is no servitu