ABSTRACT
The author has submitted his manuscript to Werblowskys with the request that he should write a few words by way of introduction. The author has, however, rightly discerned that, although the problem of Milton's Paradise Lost is primarily a subject for literary criticism, it is, as a piece of confessional writing, fundamentally bound up with certain psychological assumptions. In Milton's time these ideas were very much in the air, forming part of the general stock of culture, and there were not a few Masters who realized that their philosophical stone was none other than the "total man". The Satan-Prometheus parallel shows clearly enough that Milton's devil stands for the essence of human individuation and thus comes within the scope of psychology. It is a psychological rule that when an archetype has lost its metaphysical hypostasis, it becomes identified with the conscious mind of the individual, which it influences and refashions in its own form.
