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The Greeks made the Muses goddesses of poetry and the arts who lived on mountains such as Helicon, Aganippe, or Pieria. It was the liquid from these springs which inspired the poets and thus the myth admirably supports the theory that poetry stems from an oral level of the unconscious.
“The Muses may be taken as pregenital mother symbols,” Wormhoudt (1949) continues, in what today we may gag at as blissfully simplistic equations: “The mountains are the breast symbols and the springs as milk which issues from the breast” (p. 234). Sounds are profoundly connected with liquids in this study of poetry; hence its title, “The Unconscious Identification, Words = Milk” (Wormhoudt, 1949). Yet, however we may view this equation, its literal-mindedness need not dissuade us from granting (1) empirical data that inform us that language, nursing, and mother love all proceed simultaneously during the first year of life; and (2) psychoanalytic formulations that note the interchangeability of words and things in the infant's developing mind (Kubie, 1953).
More to the point, Greenson (1954) demonstrates the intimate bond between oral sounds and oral object. The one sound, he notes, that the infant can produce to express pleasure and contentment while the maternal nipple is in his mouth is that of mmrn (the bilabial nasal [m]). When the nipple is withdrawn, the vowel approximation of a-a-h is uttered. Thus the retention and release of the nurturing object is symbolized linguistically in the culturally reinforced expression for mother: mm—a-ah. It is not possible that the infant's m-ah