Chapter 14 William Blake and Epistemic Narcissism

I think William Blake was a great writer. He was also a great believer. He is often described as a visionary poet, a term also applied to others, such as Wordsworth, who are regarded as members of the English Romantic movement. In Blake’s case, however, the term has a particular meaning because from childhood to the end of his life he had visions, in the sense that Joan of Arc or Bernadette of Lourdes had visions; he insisted on their perceptual reality and the validity of their content. He had a one-person religion, or perhaps two-person, as Catherine Blake, his wife, played Echo to his Narcissus in a thoroughgoing way.

In this chapter I suggest that what Blake saw as a religious system necessary to redeem mankind from its calamitous fall from eternity I would see as a psycho-pathological organisation meant to remedy a psychological catastrophe. In some of his writings, for example The Everlasting Gospel or A Vision of the Last Judgement, he articulates his system as a religious creed. In his prophetic books he describes, in the form of a series of epics concerning his own mythological characters, a mental catastrophe and a psychic remedy. He insisted that these epics were not allegories, but visions. And he believed that mankind s fall and redemption were a mental event since divinity existed only within the mind. I think that his conscious belief system served an unconscious purpose, that it was a counter-belief system which was meant to protect him from, and remedy, an already-existing unconscious belief that would lead him to terror or despair. The psychological situation that is dreaded has in fact already happened, and he

gives an account of it in his epic poetic accounts of the Fall. His defensive and remedial belief system is a remarkably insightful account of what I called epistemic narcissism in the last chapter. I defined an epi