Part III argues that an awareness of the composite nature of the self is a fundamental element of Eliot’s poetic engagement with the literary past. This chapter begins the analysis of the many self-doublings in Eliot’s writing: the internalised split self of the modern consciousness in thrall to ancient ghosts and its own ‘dark embryo’. It examines Eliot’s statements regarding his own process of composition, which acknowledge a vertiginous element in the personality and psychology that must be nourished, allowed to fecundate, and then retrieved. This embryonic image of the creative germ contrasts with the more conventional imagery of divine inspiration. The chapter considers the ways in which Eliot’s images of splitting, hollowness and shadow are given form by the language and imaginative structures of depth psychology (partially filtered through the pre-Freudian psychology of Roger Vittoz), despite the poet’s hostility to mental excavation and exposure. Delving into concepts of creative illness and the escape from personality, it attempts, in Karl Miller’s suggestive phrase, to expound on ‘the relationship between psychiatry’s fugues and literature’s flights’.