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To the Editors: Re Shelley's Ode to the West Wind, for Shelley, identification, succor and strength tend to be one. His identification with the West Wind, like that with Queen Mab, or Laone, the combination of mother and self in The Revolt of Islam, and his merging with the beloved in Epipsychidion, all illustrate the engulfing, fortifying nature of love and identification, as he conceived of love.
Re the diagnosis of Shelley as manic depressive, I agree that the “clue to the main pathodynamics … lies, of course, in the reaction of rebellion against the father's control,” as Dr. Saul points out. It was Newman Ivy White, author of the detailed Portrait of Shelley (Knopf, 1945), who stated that Shelley was manic depressive, and added the question: What more is there to say about it? I mentioned in my paper on Shelley in this journal that there were certain similarities between this great poet and the manic depressive patients studied by a group of Washington psychoanalysts. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann's paper on manic depressives was published in 1959. Then in 1961 Edith Weigert's paper appeared. (Previously, Lewin's work on manic depressive cycles had seemed to corroborate Shelley's cryptic messages about himself in his own writings.) Shelley's outstanding characteristic was not that he was given to mood-swings but that his genius utilized his conflicting unconscious and conscious powers and, at his best, integrated their entirety. Like Proust, Shelley sensed that there was more meaning in what he wrote than he, himself, was aware of. It was Shelley's intent to impart new psychological knowledge that would improve mankind.
Freud questioned whether manic depressive swings were psychogenic or “spontaneous.” He thought they might sometimes be constitutional.1 What light can Shelley's fantasies throw on what is cause and what is effect? Which came first, the defiant acting out or the moodswing? Do conflicts cause moodswings or vice versa? Both seem inextricably involved, in She