The Chamber of Maiden Thought (Psychology Revivals)

Literary Origins of the Psychoanalytic Model of the Mind

Meg Harris Williams, Margot Waddell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135039783
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychanalyse

Literature is recognised as having significantly influenced the development of modern psychoanalytic thought. In recent years psychoanalysis has drawn increasingly on the literary and artistic traditions of western culture and moved away from its original medical–scientific context. Originally published in 1991 The Chamber of Maiden Thought (Keats's metaphor for 'the awakening of the thinking principle') is an original and revealing exploration of the seminal role of literature in forming the modern psychoanalytic model of the mind.
The crux of the 'post-Kleinian' psychoanalytic view of personality development lies in the internal relations between the self and the mind's 'objects'. Meg Harris Williams and Margot Waddell show that these relations have their origins in the drama of identifications which we can see played out metaphorically and figuratively in literature, which presents the self-creative process in aesthetic terms. They argue that psychoanalysis is a true child of literature rather than merely the interpreter or explainer of literature, illustrating this with some examples from clinical experience, but drawing above all on close scrutiny of the dynamic mental processes presented in the work of Shakespeare, Milton, the Romantic poets, Emily Bronte and George Eliot.
The Chamber of Maiden Thought will encourage psychoanalytic workers to respond to the influence of literature in exploring symbolic mental processes. By bringing psychoanalysis into creative conjunction with the arts, it enables practitioners to tap a cultural potential whose insights into the human mind are of immense value.

1

SHAKESPEARE: A LOCAL HABITATION AND A NAME

O brave new world,

That has such people in't!

(The Tempest, V.i. 184–5)

Miranda's exclamation at the end of The Tempest undermines its own apparent irony, by throwing an aura of optimistic wonder over the specimens of common humanity assembled before her, who vary from the weak-minded to the irredeemable. The magician Prospero's appetite has become jaded, but there is hope for the world because his sense of wonder has been released to colonize it and change its complexion. Although this is the end of Shakespeare's play and of his life's oeuvre, and the playwright has decided to shed his robe and break his staff, we feel that in a sense every Shakespearean play begins like this: with a collection of characters, perhaps aspects of a single mind, who are none of them much more than ‘arrant knaves, crawling between earth and heaven’ (as Hamlet describes himself). But when they start to become related to each other in the terms of a dramatic poem, animated by the poetic magic, a veil is stripped away and they become facets of a inner world, revealing the mind in the process of working. This applies even to those elements without poetry in themselves – those who, like Antonio, do not know the difference between their conscience and a chilblain. Yet even the hero in a Shakespeare play, well aware of the 'deity’ conscience, is not necessarily particularly virtuous or the ‘noblest of them all’. He is the one who – in terms of Keats's ‘Chamber of Maiden Thought’ metaphor – sees the door standing ajar into the next chamber of thought, and begins to move towards it, impelled perhaps by forces which he would like to resist. This movement draws the other characters, who are realigned around him with the increasing inevitability of a network of psychic tensions. Ultimately this may lead to the threshold of a brave new world, in either tragedy or comedy; or we may find, instead, that more has been learnt about the forces which impede development than those which promote it. Bearing in mind this underlying concern with the struggle toward creative thought and development, this chapter will focus on some crucial aspects of a selection of the plays taken in chronological order.

KING RICHARD II

In Richard II (1595), Shakespeare can be seen to portray the violent disintegration of a society which is probably, without being aware of it, ripe for destabilization; the chivalric mode is ready to be exchanged for realpolitik. The unified society, or unified mind, is shown to be really at a crisis point, by the ease with which it splits when a perceptive individual refuses to uphold one of its codes – that is, when Richard dismisses the duel between Mowbray and Bolingbroke. The medieval tapestry of the play's background imagery with its composite emblems, of crown, sun, green land, and tree circulating blood, reminds us continually that the very idea of England the mother-country corresponds to some primitive organism which requires the obedience of each component to maintain its health. As king, Richard is both the most dominant component, and the most dependent on the system. Initially, Gaunt in his famous speech about the ‘sceptr'd isle’ – ‘this other Eden, demi-paradise’ – presents in poetic terms the reigning vision of a united mind in a rounded space encompassed by the divine crown. It is a space fertile and magically protected like a fortress:

This fortress built by Nature for herself

Against infection and the hand of war,

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea, …

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,

This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,…

(II.i. 43–51)

The blood-relationships which knit together this organism are repeatedly stressed, and they focus on the king, whose existence and authority depend absolutely upon his obedience to the total worldview. The body of the king is sacred in so far as it reflects the body politic, and his mind is almost adhesively identified with the image of the sceptred isle. Should he fail to uphold this identification, his deathbed will be (as Gaunt warns him) ‘no lesser than [his] land’. Land, crown, and mind are one: ‘incaged in so small a verge’ (I. 101). There is an interlude in which the palace Gardeners describe the principles of the commonwealth, intending to condemn Richard for breaking the rules. However, the naive clarity of their analysis serves instead to expose the defects of the system. For while Gaunt's speech conveys the original poetry of the medieval ideal, the Gardener – unintentionally so all the more effectively – highlights its Machiavellian and (spiritually speaking) uneconomic qualities. Thus the Gardeners' solution to social unrest is to lop off the heads of ‘great and growing men’ because ‘all must be even in our government’:

Superfluous branches

We lop away, that bearing boughs may live;

Had he done so, himself had borne the crown…

(III.iv. 63–5)

Richard has already lopped off the head of Gloucester before the play begins; but this in itself is not his crime against society, for if he had allowed a further murder to take place by means of the duel, that crime would have been expiated, in terms of the chivalric code. This would have been acceptable to all parties. It is not murder as such which the social organism abhors, but breaches in its unifying code of behaviour. This code is what keeps the blood circulating in the tree, and the sun or crown protecting the green island, womb of kings; and probably what stops a steady stream of surreptitious haemorrhages from becoming a bloodbath of civil war (the ‘Golgotha’ prophesied by Carlisle).

But there are signs that a more complex mentality is ready to emerge. Richard, in his position of privilege as mother England's favourite son, has glimpsed the truth about the surreptitious haemorrhages – their wastage of expensively reared blood (which he is entitled to regard as his own), and also the absurdity and playacting which maintains this code of false art. He deflates the ‘honour’ of Mowbray and Bolingbroke by dismissing the verbose and pompous chivalric ceremony which supports the social fabric, prologue to the aborted duel:

Let them lay by their helmets and their spears,

And both return back to their chairs again.

(I.iii. 119–20)

They feel their status as cousins to the crown has been ridiculed and undermined. One of them (Mowbray) accepts his fate as one whom the crown has in a sense entombed alive: symbolized by his tongue ‘doubly portcullis'd with my teeth and lips’ (I. 167); the other (Bolingbroke) implicitly prophesies a new social order in which he will be instrumental: the ‘sun will shine’ on other lands than Richard's, and the idea of England – no longer fixed but movable – is ‘my mother and my nurse that bears me yet’ (I. 307).

The drama then focuses on the split between the political and the poetic, which Richard has initiated without foreseeing the consequences. The inevitable rise of Bolingbroke as political leader is interplayed with the downfall of Richard as the poet-politician king of the old England. Bolingbroke himself is not driven by ambition or even revenge, but by the need to reclaim his dignity. The complexity of the story lies in Richard's internal changes as he sharpens himself against Bolingbroke in an attempt to discover what shape his new identity might take. In undermining the old order he has at the same time undermined himself (as Gaunt prophesied, he was ‘possessed to depose himself – a paradoxical degradation). Originally his personal as well as his political mentality was inextricably linked with his view of himself at the top of the tree, borne by the crown, with a narcissistic faith in its magically protective powers. This had its repercussions in his homosexuality, an integral part of the picture. Having dismissed the ‘helmets and spears’ of his blood-brothers as childish toys, Richard now has to confront the possibility that his own sceptre and crown are also no longer the expression of a divine poetry but mere toys of office. More than that, the crown in becoming ‘hollow’, is no longer a protector of England's children but a murderer of those who appeared to be her favourites. The teeming womb of royal kings becomes a death's head as it was for Mowbray (an emotional identification which Richard now has to pursue for himself); it is a cage starving its internal children to death, its infant kings

All murthered – for within the hollow crown

That rounds the moral temples of a king

Keeps Death his court, and there the antic sits

Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,

Allowing him a little breath, a little scene,

To monarchise, be fear'd, and kill with looks;…

Infusing him with self and vain conceit,

As if this flesh which walls about our life

Were brass impregnable; and humour'd thus,

Comes at the last, and with a little pin

Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!

(III.ii. 160–70)

Richard bids farewell to a kingship which was a delusory place of nurture for body and mind alike, a castle of false art deflated by a pin-prick. In place of the crown, in the deposition scene he takes up a mirror, as if to consider its potential as a symbolic container for the meaning of his inner world:

O flatt'ring glass,

Like to my followers in prosperity,

Thou dost beguile me. Was this face the face

That every day under his household roof

Did keep ten thousand men? Was this the face

That like the sun did make beholders wink?

Is this the face which fac'd so many ollies,

That was at last out-fac'd by Bolingbroke?

A brittle glory shineth in this face …

(IV.i. 279–87)

Bolingbroke quietly observes that this also is an act: ‘The shadow of your sorrow hath destroyed the shadow of your face’; yet this speech, together with Bolingbroke's reaction (internalized by Richard as a contrary tension to the Mowbray identification) seems to mark Richard's understanding of his ‘brittle’ narcissism, a genuine self-recognition. He had imagined himself as some Helen of Troy (the ‘face which launched a thousand ships’ in Marlowe's Faustus), whose innate beauty governed England like the sun, rather than simply retaining power according to the principle of rights of succession stated by Bolingbroke.

Yet in Richard's pageantry there is also genuine poetry, just as there was in Gaunt's vision of the sceptered isle; the poetic strand in both the older and the younger generation contrasts with the rhetorical bombast used by the protagonists of the duel. But the poetry is now being split away from the superficial glamour of political office, a split reflected in the shadow of civil war. The Richard who had the perception to find the duel distasteful, uneconomic and unaesthetic, was not wholly deceived in his sense of some innate privilege in spiritual qualities which would accompany him from the sceptred isle, through the hollow crown and the brittle glass, to his ultimate containing symbol (before the grave itself) – the shadow-world of the prison at the end of the play. Bolingbroke, passively and against his will, finds it his destiny to accept the hollow crown which Richard has (also unwillingly) imposed upon him, together with the illusory glamorous shell of a public identity. Thus in the account of his coronation given by York (who is throughout impressed by such externalities), Bolingbroke is seen as a ‘well-dress'd actor’, a player-king dependent on popular favour; he is ‘painted imagery’ for the ‘greedy’ eyes of the gawping multitude (V.ii. 11–17). The face of a united poetic England will never be seen again. Meanwhile Richard, in prison, is faced with a problem which cannot be solved in this play, since the play's action has consisted in singling it out and defining it: namely, how to construct an artistic or poetic identity which is not a shadow but genuine self-expression, a real drama of the mind:

I have been studying how I may compare

This prison where I live unto the world …

My brain I'll prove the female to my soul,

My soul the father, and these two beget

A generation of still-breeding thoughts,

And these same thoughts people this little world …

(V.v. 1–9)

This is Richard's first and only soliloquy, despite the impression of soliloquizing given by the declamations of Flint Castle and the deposition scenes. In it, Shakespeare focuses on the condition of the playwright in his solitary but not lonely prison: ‘hammering it out’ between contrary poles of the mind (‘male’ and ‘female’), and awaiting inspiration from outside the Chamber of Maiden Thought, the illumination of a brave new world. The prison doors will shortly open to put an end to Richard's life; but before this there is a curious episode, heralded by music, between the ex-king and the Groom who (unacknowledged by him) used to look after his passionate energies in his previous life (the horse now overtaken by Bolingbroke). When Richard finds he cannot perform his creative act unaided, Shakespeare introduces, as in many another play, the unseen music which so often signifies a divine intervention. But here, the music is not harmonious but awkward and jarring, and it takes Richard a while for the meaning of the symbol to penetrate and bring to him the revelation of his true tragic fault: ‘I wasted time, and now doth time waste me’ (1. 49). Having done this, he can recognize that this inharmonious, uncourtly music (so different from the days of the sceptered isle) is in fact a sign of ‘love’: that it carries a quality and a meaning which his previous culture and inheritance had prevented him from hearing:

Yet blessing on his heart that gives it me,

For 'tis a sign of love; and love to Richard

In a strange brooch in this all-hating world.

(11. 64–6)

The music ‘mads’ him, but it is the appearance of madness which accompanies the first steps toward insight, with their initial discordance. Richard is now ready to receive (or imagine) the Groom, who is emotionally if not literally associated with this new music. The Groom in Richard's previous existence was the lowest of his minions, but on the threshold of his new mental existence he represents a Hermes-like spirit of communication with lost or unknown emotional depths (the horse). Richard's renewed contact with the ugly and the humble elements of what was once his kingdom reminds him of a beauty which Helen of Troy never possessed, a ‘strange brooch’ wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Shakespeare: A Local Habitation and a Name
• 2 Milton: The Mind's Own Place
• 3 Blake: The Mind's Eye
• 4 Wordsworth: The Visionary Gleam
• 5 Coleridge: Progressive Being
• 6 Keats: Soul-Making
• 7 Emily Bronte: Metamorphosis of the Romantic Hero
• 8 George Eliot: The Unmapped Country
• 9 Parallel Directions in Psychoanalysis
• Epilogue
• Notes and references
• Selected bibliography
• Name index
• Subject index