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In Milton’s (1968)Paradise Lost, Satan, looking at Adam and Eve together, feels consumed by envy and jealousy:
Sight hateful, sight tormenting! Thus these two
Imparadised in one another’s arms
The happier Eden shall enjoy their fill
Of bliss on bliss, whilst I to hell am thrust
Ron Britton quotes this in his paper ‘Milton’s Narcissist or Blake’s True Self?’ (Britton 1998) to illustrate his take on the relationship between pride and envy in connection with the Oedipus complex. I want to use it here to indicate the geographical closeness, rather than the oppositional distance, between paradise and hell in a particular mental constellation in which jealousy and envy are felt to be unbearable. ‘Hell’ is a state of mind which occurs at the sight of a couple, Adam and Eve, felt to be locked up with each other in what seems to be an impenetrable way – Satan as desperate oedipal child could run round and round this couple in rage and despair without ever catching their eye, as it were. Hell is the belief that the intercourse you are excluded from is perfect, all consuming and eternal. The theme of this chapter is excessive pathological splitting, idealisation and erotisation used as a massive defence against this tormenting belief, and, indeed, against all psychic pain. Cure from psychic pain is effected by the
creation of an idealised couple of self and object living for ever in (highly erotised) bliss, where the ‘third’ excluded is reality — external and internal. The consequence of excessive splitting and projection of everything that is painful and disturbing is the simultaneous eruption of a hell which is then felt to be all around the self as a constant threat, always potentially returning and invading the mind.
At this point in the narrative of Paradise Lost Satan the all-powerful schemer takes over again from his temporary fall into becoming Satan-in-love; he knows that he cannot have imparadised bliss, but he can destroy it. He can do this by seducing Eve awa