On creativity and psychological boundaries in the life and work of William Blake

This study examines the relationship between psychological boundaries, identity formation, and creative work in a single case study of the eminent poet, painter and printer William Blake. It utilizes a narrative approach informed by the perspectives of object relations and contemporary relational psychoanalysis to investigate the way the form and thematic content of Blake's work both shaped and were shaped by his efforts to negotiate a psychological integration at the boundaries of self-other and inner-outer experience. D.W. Winnicott's models of potential space and transitional phenomena along with Marion Milner's theory of the role of illusion in symbol formation are applied to Blake's work and interpersonal development.;The investigative method is drawn from a combination of three research paradigms, those of The Narrative Study of Lives, psychobiographic inquiry and Howard Gruber's Evolving Systems Approach to creativity research. As in these methods, the dialectic between structural problems in the creative work and relational problems in the life becomes the focus of investigation. Primary data are provided by the composite art of two of Blake's early illuminated texts, Songs of Innocence and of Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, by selected paintings from the same period, and by his letters and notebook entries. Several recent biographies as well as biographical essays by Blake's contemporaries, along with previous psychological studies of his work and commentaries on his literary and artistic contributions, were also consulted.;Blake's deliberate and sophisticated engagement with the concept of boundaries, both as an artist and as a man, provided a basis for the psychological analysis of the study. Discussed are the effects of how boundaries---or what he called "the bounding line"---became the cornerstone of his pictorial aesthetic practice, and how in his narrative poems and prophecies, depictions of intrapsychic and interpersonal boundaries were represented as occasions of bondage or union with an other. Comparing these usages to the dilemmas of merger and separation in Blake's personal life led to a focus on the transformational properties of boundaries as changing positions in the mental organization of his psychic economy.;This case study seeks to contribute to the ongoing discussion among contemporary psychoanalysts and developmentalists concerning the need for a more dynamic understanding of the dimensions and movements of boundaries over time. It concludes that in the life of William Blake, boundary issues were worked out through the imaginative and material production of his art. It points to the additional research question of whether or not the push and pull of psychological boundaries is a significant general feature of artistic creativity.