‘Mental Joy & Mental Health / And Mental Friends & Mental Wealth’: Blake and Art Therapy

Abstract

Blake, it seems, has been in therapy for decades. From Marion Milner’s Freudian analysis of the Job prints, to the gallery visitor who asks ‘wasn’t he mad?’, viewers have persistently read in(to) Blake’s visual work the traces of psychological disturbance (Milner 168–91). Since Freud’s seminal description of art as ‘an activity intended to allay ungratified wishes’ (‘Claims’ 187), a range of psychologists and psychiatrists, such as R.D. Laing and C.G. Jung, have turned to Blake in exploring the nature of visionary states. Laing’s concept of the ‘ontologically secure’ individual was an important one that also clearly drew on the psychomachia evident in Blake’s works such as The Four Zoas, observing that the schizoid individual sought to protect himself from a Blakean ‘chaotic non-entity’ (Laing 60–1), while Jung’s The Red Book drew on Blake’s illuminated books as well as medieval manuscripts as a means of examining the activities of the unconscious.¹