Introduction

The poetic ideas of creative thought find their pioneering expression in symbolic forms rather than in discursive philosophy: for “an idea cannot be conveyed but by a symbol”. The Romantic poets, whom W. R. Bion saw as “the first psychoanalysts”, derived their principles of creativity from their towering poetic fore-bears—the ancient poets, and the brave new worlds won by William Shakespeare and John Milton. Shakespeare and Milton discovered that the new world is a place not of fixities and definite, of reward and punishment, but where the idea of “the good” consists in the goal of development and the gradual, painful, but also joyful getting of wisdom. “Psyche”, with its rediscovery of a “neglected goddess”, may be taken–as its title indicates—as the work that establishes the possibility of psychoanalysis from the poetic perspective. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.