post-natal experience. In speaking of his love for Alice Meynell and its swift onset, he says: (R) For swift it was, yet quiet as the birth Of smoothest Music in a Master's soul. ...yea, it was still As the young Moon that bares her nightly breast, O Halcyon! was thine auspice not of rest? In the "Night of Forebeing" we read: (S) And all the springs are flash-lights of one Spring. For her surcharged heart. Having reached this point I would venture the opinion that in Francis Thompson we have a unique psychical fixation of libido at the oral level. Psychically he was never weaned. Physically separated from the mother, he mourned and refused earth's meat through the remainder of his life. His life, his disasters, his poetry are all expressions both of that initial joy in gratification and that first sorrow of deprivation. So to Alice Meynell, speaking of his frustrated love for her: (U) A hand-clasp I must feed on for a night, A noon, although the untasted feast you lay, ...make essay What 'tis to pass unsuppered to your couch, The famine which these craving lines avouch! The analogy is, that to understand his drouth she must go unsuppered too; unconsciously he projects the same situation between herself and her husband as he wishes unconsciously between himself and the mother. So we find him speaking of the sun as (C') Thou genitor that all things nourishest! He speaks elsewhere of "God focussed to a point," of "When God was stolen from men's mouths stolen was the bread." This brings me to his conception of Deity as "twi-formed": The nipple and the penis are one symbol. In suckling at the mother's breast he is suckled by the father too. When he is weaned "God is stolen from the mouth"-separation is weaning, which is equivalent to castration. Hence the significance of the Hound of Heaven. (B) All which I took from thee I did but take, Not for thy harms, But just that thou might'st seek it in My arms— i.e. at the breast of the twi-formed Deity there is union again in the Godhead. The cycle of pursuit is clear in "New Year's Chimes": (W) The chase that's chased is the Lord o' the chase, And the pursued cries on the race; And the hounds in leash are the hounds that run. The world above in the world below The cycle is in the poet himself: (S) My little worlded self! the shadows pass Of all processions that revolve in thee: Not only of cyclic Man Thou here discern'st the plan, Not only of cyclic Man, but of the cyclic Me. Not solely of Mortality's great years The reflex just appears, But thine own bosom's year, still circling round In ample and in ampler gyre Toward the far completion, wherewith crowned, Love unconsumed shall chant in his own furnace-fire. And note again, it is the bosom's year that is the cycle. The cycle may be represented as the circle of the sun, the moon, the breast, or the womb, "the Mystic Sun," "the Virgin's womb." Addressing the sun he says: (D) To thine own shape Thou round'st the chrysolite of the grape, The phases of this eternal cycle alternate thus: The sun has been chasing the earth. This is the pursuit. We glimpse the wonderment of the primitive mind in the child in a riot of imagery. He sees the sinking sun touching the earth in the west. Then he thinks earth is held to the sun's bosom. "The earth is suckled at thy shining breast." It may be that the earth mother is suckling the sun, for he says in one poem (X) The sopped sun-toper as ever drank hard Stares foolish, hazed, Rubicund, dazed, Totty with thine October tankard. The sun sinks into earth. It is night, and the sun and earth are one. The sun is in the earth, and it is night with "orgiastic revelries." It is also death, as well as the "Night of Forebeing," for the sun is the child too within the womb. The chase begins again with the Resurrection of the Sun, Christ risen from the Tomb. But for the poet the magic circle is broken by an interlude, the sentence of life. Suckled at the mother's breast, he is still one with the mother and still suckled thus by the father. Separated from her "God is robbed out of his mouth" and he "must fare forward to the dull vale, robbed of his Godhead." But, psychically one with the mother, he, like her, remains the pursued, though pursuit means chastisement and despoiling, and never love. Love comes only when the magic circle is entered again. The third phase represents this. (J) 'Whence He sprung, there He returneth Or, as he says in another poem, he enters "the sacred bridal gloom of death." In the nuptials of death the cycle is complete again. He is sustenant to the mother even as the sun suckles her-Father and son are one, "beyond the pillars of death and the corridors of the grave in the union of spirit to spirit within the containing Spirit of God." Cyclic unrest is now balanced by 'cyclic equipoise.' The conscious life of Thompson is represented by the second of these phases—unsceptred, undiademed, i.e. the weaned and castrated one. (P) He faring down To the dull vale, his Godhead peels from him Till he can scarcely spurn the pebble That the poet is omnipotent is shown in his life and work. He is a Creator, like God. Song, "A Water-child like Earth," is the child he has created, as God created the earth. He calls himself a "conduit running wine of song" -a father image, or "The Four Rivers," "Fountain watering Paradise of Old"-a mother image from the "Assumpta Maria." Or he speaks of himself as putting on "swift quickening" and then of "Suckling the baby song." He speaks in one place of Earth as "God's daughter," and in another, of "Eve grown marriageable for God"-the Eve that God has produced: and here I would recall the passage about the body's interplay with the spirit: (Y) This pair whose bond is at once filial and marital. He was assured of the immortality of his name, an assurance paradoxical enough in the face of his hesitancy and his neglect of the world. In mighty metres and jewelled words, the Universe was his box of toys. He too, like Shelley, "tumbles in the stardust" and the "Moon is his sister, the stars his brethren." He swings the earth "a trinket at his wrist." His outward life expresses not only, as we have seen, an endless yielding up of all to the relentless pursuer, but it has this other significance too-a deep-seated infantile omnipotence. The evidences of this unconscious infantile omnipotence are to be seen in his timelessness, his neglect of all ties and obligations, his disregard of health, his dependence upon others for food and shelter, and that immunity in spirit that enabled him to live under such dire conditions. All alike point to a fundamental desolation of spirit when confronted by the limitations of time and space in a reality world. He died with the toy theatre near him. We might formulate much of Freud's theory of infantile sexuality from Thompson's poetry so direct is the transcript from the unconscious mind to great verse. The world will accept its poets if not its scientists, and the poets know, although they do not know they know. (Z) We speak a lesson taught we know not how, The hearer better than the utterer knows. (A) To My Godchild. (B) The Hound of Heaven. (E) Heaven and Hell. (M) The After Woman. QUOTATIONS FROM: (N) The Singer Saith of his Song. (Q) The Mistress of Vision. (R) Sonnet IV: Ad Amicam. (S) From the Night of Forebeing. (T) Of Nature: Laud and Plaint. (U) Love's Almsman Plaineth His Fare. (V) Hermes. (W) New Year's Chimes. (X) A Corymbus for Autumn. (Y) Essay on Health and Holiness. (Z) Sister Songs. A PSYCHO-ANALYTICAL STUDY OF A PHANTASY OF ST THÉRÈSE DE L'ENFANT JÉSUS1 By I. F. GRANT DUFF. THE subject of this study is a French girl who died in 1897, and was canonized this year, only twenty-seven years after her death. Her autobiography2 was published a few years ago. The greater part of it was written when she was twenty-two, at the request of her sister Pauline3 who was prioress of the convent where she was a nun. The whole of the life is very interesting from a psycho-analytical point of view, but here I only propose to make a short study of a certain phantasy which persisted through her life, and was the chief unconscious factor in her resolve to become a nun, and led to a certain neglect of her health which probably hastened her death. This phantasy is concerned with the Oedipus complex. Thérèse Françoise Martin was born on January 2, 18734. Both her parents were intensely religious, and both of them showed neurotic symptoms, the father having such severe mental derangement towards the end of his life that he had to spend three years in some sort of an asylum. There were nine children, four of whom died in infancy. Five girls survived. Marie, the eldest, was fourteen years older than Thérèse, who was the youngest. Her mother died when she was four and a half years old. The picture we have of her before this event is of a merry, nervous, precocious, much loved child. After this she was over-sensitive and tearful, until she was thirteen, when she says that a small miracle happened which enabled her to overcome this flaw in her characters. Unfortunately we are told nothing about this miracle except that it took place after Marie went into the Carmelites, and that it took place at Christmas. We shall see the importance of these two factors later. She spent a great deal of time with her father, and appears to have been his favourite. He was devoted to her. His usual name for her was "Little Queen." She in her turn 1 Read before the British Psycho-Analytical Society on November 18th, 1925. 2 La Bienheureuse Thérèse de l'Enfant-Jésus. Imprimerie de St Paul, 36, Bar-le-Duc, Meuse. [All page references relate to this work.] |