Shelley and the Romantic Imagination: A Psychological Study

Shelley was the most extreme and controversial of the English Romantics, and this book studies the most romantic element in his vision and in Romanticism in general: the attempt to bring to life imaginings of ideal eros and of a human paradise. Using concepts from Freud and such later psychoanalytic writers as Geza Roheim, Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Kris, Heinz Kohut, and Margaret Mahler, Shelley and the Romantic Imagination analyzes an interplay in Shelley between a regressive impulse to return to union with the mother and an aggressive, progressive impulse toward a separate, autonomous ego.