The Vale of Soul-Making: The Post-Kleinian Model of the Mind

"The Vale of Soul-Making" promises to become the text for post-Kleinian thought.. and the upshot of it all is to establish Mrs Klein as the first ‘post-Kleinian’."-- Donald Meltzer

Poets have always seen themselves as inspired by their Muse. In this book this is taken literally, not just metaphorically, to be a faithful description of an internal identification with a teaching object or deity that governs the adventure of writing the poem. The central concern of the book is therefore the relationship of each individual poet with his Muse, as worked out "on the pulses" through the expressive qualities of poetic language. The awesome qualities of the internal Muse were discovered by Melanie Klein in the "combined object", and developed into a theory of knowledge by Wilfred Bion and Donald Meltzer, who have shown how "learning from experience" occurs by repeatedly confronting the aesthetic conflict evoked by the internal object at points of "catastrophic change" in mental evolution.
The impelling nature of the quest for knowledge of the inner world prompted Keats to describe the world as a "vale of soul-making", teeming with opportunities for mental growth under the guidance of internal "mediators". The self-analysis of Keats and other poets by incorporating poetic qualities into their own evolving Muse provides a fascinating model of development through "influence" in a way that illuminates the complexity of identification in psychoanalysis, a process at whose core Meltzer locates the "counter-transference dream".