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The human nature unto which I feltThat I belonged, and reverenced with love,Was not a punctual presence, but a spiritDiffused through time and space, with aid derivedOf evidence from monuments, erect,Prostrate, or leaning towards their common restIn earth, the widely scattered wreck sublimeOf vanished nations.
In his definitive statement of the life of the mind as ‘The Vale of Soul-making’,2 Keats distinguishes between those who are genuinely able to explore the further chambers, the inner recesses and dark passages of what he had earlier called the ‘large Mansion of Many Appartments’ — human life, and those who stopped thinking, or at least did not ‘think into the human heart’.3 The Soul-making emphasis in the experience of life, lies in the capacity to tolerate the perception that ‘the world is full of Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and oppression’.4 That knowledge is co-terminous with the realization that it is in apprehending that very reality that the many doors open from the Chamber of Maiden Thought. In a world of Circumstances, it is the Heart which is ‘the teat from which the Mind or intelligence sucks its identity’.5
In considering how the embodiment in literature of the development of the life of the mind has illuminated the task of psychoanalysis, their congruent goals become apparent: to explore the process whereby truthful emotional experiences