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With this collection of essays, Mikael Enckell clearly places psychoanalysis within the western cultural heritage. The essays are permeated by the early psychoanalytical Traumdeutung discoveries without Freud's later explanatory models. The psychoanalyst and poet Mikael Enckell weaves the psychoanalysis and the cultural inheritance into a poetic song of mankind's spirituality. Throughout his writings, the author pleads against western rational thinking, against those scientific views which promote short-sighted explanations and give no permanent basis for understanding the vital endevaours of mankind.
In his previous books about the poets G. Björling (1972), F. Hölderlin (1975) and R. Enckell (1986), he illustrated the irrational as the essential element in knowledge-seeking human beings, and in their conflicts in harmonising with their external realities. During holidays in Greece, he felt a wish to elucidate the ethical, aesthetical and idealistic elements in his father's modernistic writings, with their roots on classical soil. He depicted his father's rebirth process in his inner struggle and protest against the prevalent social-realistic dicates in Finland. With the author's vertical line perspective leading inward and downward, he finds the centre for the spiritual in the individual's unconscious. For the reader, it is often confusing that the author uses the unconscious and the spirituality as synonyms. In this his latest book, he deepens his perspective of the individual both as the preserver of traditions and as the rebellious innovator. It is through the individual that the past survives and propagates itself.
The author refers to Plato, Dante, Goethe and Proust when he poses