ABSTRACT
The preacher, the poet, and the psychoanalyst are all concerned with the mental or spiritual reality, which is with psychic reality, which the author regards as the individual's conscious and unconscious beliefs. The preacher expounds what he considers it necessary to believe, the poet seeks to discover and communicate his own beliefs, and the psychoanalyst aims to discover and explore the beliefs of his patients. In practice the analyst might be tempted to become the preacher, trying to convert his patient, or to be the poet, exploring his own psychic reality by attributing it to his patient. John Milton and William Blake were both given to preaching. Blake was probably the first to suggest that Milton, his literary hero, was not really on the side of God but of Satan when writing Paradise Lost. Blake unashamedly propounds as the route to salvation what in psychoanalysis has been called infantile megalomania.
