The Vale of Soul-making:  the PostKleinian Model of the Mind and its Poetic Origins

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The post-Kleinian model of the mind, as developed by Wilfred Bion and Donald Meltzer, is essentially an aesthetic one.  It is founded on Melanie Klein’s discovery of the `internal object’ with its combined masculine and feminine qualities and ambiguous, awe-inspiring nature.  Turbulent emotional experiences are repeatedly transformed through symbol-formation, on the basis of the internal relationship between the infant self and its object; and the aesthetic containment provided by this `counter-transference dream’ (as Meltzer terms it) enables the mind to digest its conflicts and develop.

    This search for a pattern that can make `contrary’ emotions thinkable is modelled by all art forms and accounts for their universal significance.  It is a process that can be observed particularly clearly, in literature, in the form of the romance between the poet and his Muse (the traditional formulation of the psychoanalytic internal object).  

    This book explores the `counter-transference dreams’ of some of the inspired symbol-makers who have been most influential in forming the modern aesthetic perspective in psychoanalytic thinking: including Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Homer and Sophocles.  It concludes with a discussion of the autobiographical works which are the final expression of Bion’s own conception of the aesthetic model.

 

`Homer and Milton were not writing “poetry”; they were writing “seriously”.  They wrote poetry because it was the most serious way of writing.’

                                                                                   Wilfred Bion

 

`The Vale of Soulmaking promises to become the text for post-Kleinian thought… and the upshot of it all is to establish Mrs Klein as the first “post-Kleinian”.’

                                                                              Donald Meltzer

 

 

 

CONTENTS

 

Preface – by Donald Meltzer

Introduction 

 

1. The Stroke of the Axe (on the medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight)
2. The Evolution of Psyche  (on Keats)
3. Milton as Muse (on Keats and Milton)
4. The Fall and Rise of Eve (on Milton)
5. Oedipus at the Crossroads (on Sophocles’ Theban play)s
6. The Weavings of Athene (on Homer’s Odyssey) 
7. Cleopatra’s Monument (on Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra)
8. On Creativity – by Donald Meltzer
9. PostKleinian Poetics

 

APPENDICES on the autobiographies of Wilfred Bion

(i)             Rosemary’s Roots: Bion and his Muse

(ii)           Confessions of an Emmature Superego