Memories in Feeling

Abstract

The meaning and value of… fantasies are revealed only through their integration into the personality as a whole — that is to say, at the moment when one is confronted not only with what they mean — but also with their moral demands. C. G. Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche A man who doubts his own love may, or rather must, doubt every lesser thing. Sigmund Freud, ‘Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis’

Shelley proves to be the darkest of the Romantic poets. Certainly Blake wrote unceasingly about man’s dissociation and ‘fall into Division… his fall into the Generation of Decay & Death’ (The Four Zoas, 1.4.4–5), and in his major prophecies he entered into that dissociation with a sympathetic identification. But he did not have Shelley’s horrified sense of involvement — complicity, really — in what he found. For Shelley’s own ‘fall’ meant not only a self-division but a fall into the ‘Generation of Decay & Death’ of others. He grew increasingly honest about his destructiveness, or what Jung would call his ‘Shadow-side’. He was a moral man, and, as Jung has remarked, recognising the Shadow-side of one’s personality is essentially a moral problem.¹ Shelley’s literary works reflect his internal disorders in curious ways, and often prove disturbingly self-contradictory.