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Dr. Miller's paper is an interesting and scholarly study correlating the biography of the fascinating Romantic genius, the poet Shelley, with a psychoanalytic study of his life and works. Dr. Miller believes Shelley and Mary Godwin contributed to psychological knowledge by exposing certain imagery during manic-depressive cycles. Shelley thought of himself as a frail innocent child or else as an almost omnipotent natural force like the West Wind. He identified with legendary figures persecuted by God's tyranny, e.g., Job or Prometheus. He feared his own father and revolted against priests, governments and customs. He identified with the omniscient and supreme force of Good. He experienced heights and depths of emotion, sometimes in daily cycles. The characters in Shelley's poems were frequently subject to madness induced by persecution or lack of love. As a school boy, Shelley was nicknamed “Mad Shelley.”
Dr. Miller summarizes elements in Lewin's book, The Psychoanalysis of Elation—the effects of maladaptation on the infantile nursing phase, fears of sleep, repletion and the feeling of extinction while being devoured by the breast. Miller cites material from the poems which can be interpreted in terms of the “oral triad,” e.g., in the poem, “A Vision of the Sea,” he depicts a blissful infant at its terrified mother's breast on a sinking ship. Shelley referred to breasts frequently and Miller correlates this interest with the biographical history of four younger nursing sisters. Shelley once confessed he saw eyes instead of nipples on Mary Godwin's breasts, and a line in “The Witch of Atlas” reads: “Dog-headed, bosomeyed, bird-footed.” Shelley was sensitive, generous,
and altruistic, yet he was a cause of disaster to his wives, children, and relatives. His wife's half-sister committed suicide and his first wife, Harriet, drowned herself in the Serpentine sometime after he divorced her; he was refused custody of the two children by Harriet, and Mary's two children di