블레이크의 비전과 광기 그리고 치료술

Abstract

This paper aims to examine the vision, madness and its therapy in Blake and the meaning of them. Blake was a poet for whom madness became a major subject. He wrote about it abundantly, and in his own lifetime was accused of being mad. But the great achievement of modern criticism has been to press beyond this indictment to poetry itself, saving it from being dismissed as foolishness and confusion. As the creation of a visionary, Blake's myth functions literally as "refuge from unbelief," a psychological defense against both the hazards of visionary experience and the imputations of a secular society. Blake came by his knowledge of mental suffering firsthand. But the therapeutics of his art allows him to master that suffering and give it a form that all man and women can share in to the extent that they too honor vision. If the visionary suffers for his experience, in art he finds a healing. Blake believes that visionary art revives in the individual a lost unity that defeats death and redeems life. The therapeutic value of such an art exists in its effect upon the reader or the spectator as participant. The participation means the shattering of the individual and his fusion with primal being. Such a fusion might just help fallen men and women regain their health and happiness. Therefore, Mental suffering can be a means to health if it inspires a therapeutic form of art, one which defends against the disturbance it dramatizes.