Abstract
Thus one virtuoso of twentieth-century thought responded to the spell cast over his culture by a virtuoso of the previous generation—his response recording a now familiar progress from the spellbound to the disenchanted. Wittgenstein’s shrewdness, however, remains as yet part of only a minority tradition of skepticism about the value of Freudianism, and psychoanalysis in general, to contemporary literary critics. This chapter is a contribution to that skepticism as it applies to literary interpretation, a philosophically much narrower terrain than Wittgenstein’s genial critique envisaged, but one in which fishy thinking is no less to be avoided. This chapter falls into six sections. The first describes the enthusiastic adoption of psychoanalytic concepts into medieval studies at the very moment when they are suffering a collapse of credibility in the real world. Section II summarizes the fatal flaws now widely perceived in psychoanalytic and specifically Freudian methods of inquiry, especially in its cavalier unconcern with questions of evidence and validity. In Section III I use an apposite test case that almost irresistibly attracts psychoanalytic readings—Chaucer’s Pardoner and his Tale—to assess the usefulness or otherwise of psychoanalytic assumptions in literary interpretation. Sections IV and V offer an alternative reading of the Pardoner and his Tale that interprets the symbolic structure by reference to discourses that are not simply medieval but specifically contemporary to Chaucer. The chapter concludes with some reflections on the place of theory—whether psychoanalytic or of some other variety—in medieval literary studies.
I, too, was greatly impressed when I first read Freud. He’s extraordinary. Of course he is full of fishy thinking & his charm & the charm of the subject is so great that you may easily be fooled.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Notes
Peter L. Berger, “Towards a Sociological Understanding of Psychoanalysis,” Social Research 32 (1965), 37.
Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1961), pp. 361–92.
Steven Marcus, Freud and the Culture of Psychoanalysis: Studies in the Transition from Victorian Humanism to Modernity (Boston: G. Allen and Unwin, 1984), p. 7.
Lionel Trilling, “Freud: Within and Beyond Culture,” a lecture delivered to the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in 1955 and printed in Beyond Culture (New York: Viking Press, 1965), pp. 89–118.
See Nathan G Hale, Jr., The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States, vol. 2: Freud and the Americans, 1917–1985 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
Edwin Fuller Torrey, Freudian Fraud: The Malignant Effect of Freud’s Theory on American Thought and Culture (New York: HarperCollins, 1992)
Barry Richards, Images of Freud: Cultural Responses to Psychoanalysis (London: J. M. Dent, 1989), p. 23.
For the combination of Romantic and Enlightenment features in Freud’s thought, see Harry Trosman, “Freud’s Cultural Background,” in John E. Gedo and George H. Pollock, eds., Freud: The Fusion of Science and Humanism (New York: International Universities Press, 1976), pp. 46–70.
Richard Stevens, Freud and Psychoanalysis: An Exposition and Appraisal (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), pp. 135–7.
Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970).
The citation from Ricoeur is from Freud and Philosophy, p. 369. The hermeneutic interpretations of Ricoeur and Jürgen Habermas are subjected to a withering analysis by Adolf Grünbaum, The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 1–94.
Robert R. Holt, Freud Reappraised: A Fresh Look at Psychoanalytic Theory (New York: Guilford Press, 1989), p. 337
Sebastiano Timpanaro, The Freudian Slip: Psychoanalysis and Textual Criticism, trans. Kate Soper (London: New Left Books, 1976 [1974]).
Heinz Kohut, How Does Analysis Cure? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 93–4
G. W. Pigman III, “Applied Psychoanalysis Today,” Criticism 34 (1992), 308.
G. W. Pigman III, “Applied Psychoanalysis Today,” 309. For similar demurrals, see Gail S. Reed, “Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalysis Appropriated, Psychoanalysis Applied,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 54 (1985), 234–69
Peter Lamarque, “On the Irrelevance of Psychoanalysis to Literary Criticism,” in Peter Clark and Crispin Wright, eds., Mind, Psychoanalysis and Science (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1988), pp. 257–73.
Allan Megill, “The Reception of Foucault by Historians,” Journal of the History of Ideas 48 (1987), 117–41
In addition to the titles provided by Fradenburg, a sample of recent books that apply psychoanalytic categories of interpretation to cultural materials include Jane Chance, ed., Gender and Text in the Later Middle Ages (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1996)
E. Jane Burns, Bodytalk: When Women Speak in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993)
Gregory Stone, The Death of the Troubadour (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994)
Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken and James A. Schultz, eds., Constructing Medieval Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997)
Catherine S. Cox, Gender and Language in Chaucer (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997)
Karma Lochrie, Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999)
Clare A. Lees, ed., Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994)
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler, eds., Becoming Male in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997)
John Carmi Parsons and Bonnie Wheeler, eds., Medieval Mothering (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), pp. 63–75
Kathleen Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998)
Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre-and Postmodern (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999)
Jeremy Jeffrey Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999)
Dyan Elliott, Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998)
Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399–1422 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
Elaine Tuttle Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 223–6.
See again Fradenburg, “Criticism, Anti-Semitism and the Prioress’s Tale,” and her “‘Be Not Far From Me’ ”; Gayle Margherita, The Romance of Origins: Language and Sexual Difference in Middle English Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 82–8
Jonathan Lear, Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 16–32.
Pierre Nora, ed., Les lieux de mémoire, 7 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1984-92).
Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), pp. 55–84.
Malcolm Bowie, Lacan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 7.
Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1973 [1967])
Samuel Weber, Return to Freud: Jacques Lacan’s Dislocation of Psychoanalysis, trans. Michael Levine (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).
Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 19.
Criticisms of Lacan as severe as those levelled against Freud are not far to seek: see, for instance, François Roustang, The Lacanian Delusion, trans. Greg Sims (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990)
Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Antihumanism, trans. Mary H. S. Cattani (Amherst: University Press of New England, 1990), pp. 185–207
Frederick Crews, “The Verdict on Freud,” Psychological Science 7 (1996), 63–8
Malcolm Macmillan, Freud Evaluated: The Completed Arc (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1991).
Crews et al., The Memory Wars: Freud’s Legacy in Dispute (New York: New York Review of Books, 1995)
Crews, ed., Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend (New York: Viking, 1998).
Many of the most troubling doubts about psychoanalysis are expressed by psychoanalysts themselves. For example, Donald P. Spence begins his book The Rhetorical Voice of Psychoanalysis: Displacement of Evidence by Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994)
Marshall Edelson, Psychoanalysis: A Theory in Crisis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988)
Paul Kline, Psychology and Freudian Theory: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1984).
See SE 20.38 and Allen Esterson, Seductive Mirage: An Exploration of the Work of Sigmund Freud (Chicago: Open Court, 1993), p. 137.
“From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” in SE 17.97, 119. For a discussion of this Freudian belief, see Frank Cioffi, “Freud and the Idea of a Pseudo-Science,” in Robert Borger and Frank Cioffi, eds., Explanation in the Behavioural Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 471–99
Frank J. Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
See Elizabeth F. Loftus, Memory: Surprising New Insights into How We Remember and Why We Forget (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1980)
Alan Baddeley, Human Memory: Theory and Practice (Hove: Psychology Press, 1990)
Elizabeth F. Loftus and Katherine Ketcham, The Myth of Repressed Memory (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994)
For recent work on dreaming, see Anthony Shafton, Dream Reader: Contemporary Approaches to the Understanding of Dreams (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995)
Inge Strauch and Barbara Meier, In Search of Dreams: Results of Experimental Dream Research (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996)
Michel Jouvet, The Paradox of Sleep: The Story of Dreaming, trans. Laurence Garey (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999)
Arthur W. Epstein, Dreaming and Other Involuntary Mentation: An Essay in Neuropsychiatry (Madison: International Universities Press, 1995)
J. Allan Hobson, The Dreaming Brain (New York: Basic Books, 1988).
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, ed. and trans., The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887–1904 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 45–6.
See Crews, Memory Wars, pp. 57-8, and works cited there. The best discussion of this founding moment in the creation of psychoanalysis is provided by Esterson, Seductive Mirage, pp. 11-31; see also Richard Webster, Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis (New York, London: HarperCollins, 1995), pp. 195–213.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 43–44
See, for a sample of these investigations, Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane, eds., In Dora’s Case: Freud—Hysteria—Feminism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985)
Henri F. Ellenberger, “The Story of Anna O’: A Critical Review with New Data,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 8 (1972), 267–79
John Kerr, A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein (New York: Knopf, 1993)
Karin Obholzer, The Wolf Man: Conversations with Freud’s Patient—Sixty Years Later, trans. Michael Shaw (New York: Continuum, 1982)
Frank J. Sulloway, “Reassessing Freud’s Case Histories: The Social Construction of Psychoanalysis,” Isis 82 (1991): 245–75
Joseph Wolpe and Stanley Rachman, “Psychoanalytic ‘Evidence’: A Critique Based on Freud’s Case of Little Hans,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 131 (1960): 135–48.
Sibylle Escalona, “Problems in Psycho-analytic Research,” International Journal of Psycho-analysis 33 (1952): 11–21
Morris N. Eagle, “The Epistemological Status of Recent Developments in Psychoanalytic Theory,” in Robert S. Cohen and Larry Laudan, eds., Physics, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis: Essays in Honor of Adolf Grünbaum (Boston: D. Reidel, 1983), pp. 31–55.
Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 3 vols. (New York: Basic Books, 1953-57), 1.327
Han Israels, Der Fall Freud: die Geburt der Psychoanalyse aus der Luge, trans. (from the Dutch) Gerd Busse (Hamburg: Europaïsche Verlagsanstalt, 1999 [1993])
Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, “How a Fabrication Differs From a Lie,” London Review of Books, vol. 22, no. 8 (April 13, 2000), pp. 3–7.
See especially Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books, 1970)
Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac (New York: John Wiley, 1997)
For the dubious existence of the self-analysis, see Spence, Rhetorical Voice, chapter 5; for Freud’s misbehavior as an analyst, two instances are cited by Sulloway, “Reassessing Freud’s Case Histories,” from the correspondence with Fliess, one in 1888, the other in 1898: “I have at this moment a lady in hypnosis lying in front of me and therefore can go on writing in peace;” “I sleep during my afternoon analyses” (cited p. 157); for Freud’s enthusiasm for cocaine, Fliess’s theory of the physiological connection between the nose and the genitals, and its hideous effects upon their patient, Emma Eckstein, for which Freud refused to take responsibility, see E. M. Thornton, Freud and Cocaine: The Freudian Fallacy (London: Blond and Briggs, 1983)
Derek Pearsall, ed., Chaucer to Spenser: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 65–106
Bruce R. Smith, “Premodern Sexualities,” PMLA 115 (2000): 318–29
In this (mistaken) assumption, Dinshaw is relying upon Alfred L. Kellogg and Louis A. Haselmayer, “Chaucer’s Satire of the Pardoner,” in Alfred L. Kellogg, Chaucer, Langland, Arthur: Essays in Middle English Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1972), pp. 212–44
Siegfried Wenzel, “Chaucer’s Pardoner and His Relics,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 11 (1989): 37–41
Walter Clyde Curry, Chaucer and the Mediaeval Sciences, 2d ed. (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1960 [1926]), pp. 54–70.
F. D. Matthew, ed., The English Works of Wyclif Hitherto Unprinted, EETS, o.s. 74 (London: Trübner, 1880), pp. 6–7.
Richard M. Wunderli, London Church Courts and Society on the Eve of the Reformation (Cambridge: Medieval Academy of America, 1981), pp. 83–4.
David N. Klausner, ed., Records of Early English Drama: Herefordshire, Worcestershire (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990).
According to Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988)
This large topic cannot be adequately discussed here, but suggestive accounts may be found in Pamela Gradon, “Langland and the Ideology of Dissent,” Proceedings of the British Academy 66 (1980), 179–205
Lynn Staley, “Chaucer and the Postures of Sanctity,” in David Aers and Lynn Staley, The Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics, and Gender in Late Medieval English Culture (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), pp. 179–259.
James Henthorn Todd, ed., An Apology for Lollard Doctrines, Camden Society, o.s., 20 (London: J. B. Nichols, 1842), p. 52.
Lilian M. Swinburn, The Lanteme of Li3t, EETS, o.s. 151 (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1917), p. 76.
Gloria Cigman, ed., Lollard Sermons, EETS, o.s. 294 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 113.
G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), p. 373
G. R. Owst, Preaching in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926), p. 105.
This interpretation is present in William Peraldus, Summae virtutum ac vitiorum, 2 vol. (Antwerp: Philippus Nutius, 1571), 2.34
John Wyclif, De Mandatis divinis, ed. Johann Loserth and F. D. Matthew (London: Trübner, 1922), p. 162.
George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson, eds., Piers Plowman: The B Version (London: Athlone Press, 1975), pp. 346–47.
This particular reading of the Old Man’s speech—less the literary history of the Judas legend—was first provided by Robert P. Miller, “Chaucer’s Pardoner, the Scriptural Eunuch, and the Pardoner’s Tale,” Speculum 30 (1955): 180–99.
I am indebted to a Yale undergraduate, Andrew Hongo, and his teacher David Quint, for bringing this allusion to my notice. Lawrence Besserman, Chaucer and the Bible: A Critical Review of Research, Indexes, and Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1988)
The only other vernacular text that I know in which an allusion to John 3.1-12 occurs is the Chevalier de la charrete by Chretien de Troyes. Two young knights warn Lancelot that to cross the sword bridge is no more possible “than for a man to enter the womb of his mother and be reborn” (“ne que li hom porroit antrer / el vantre sa mere et renestre”): Mario Roques, ed., Le Chevalier de la Charrete, CFMA 83 (Paris: H. Champion, 1963), lines 3056-57, p. 93.
Norris J. Lacy, ed., Lancelot-Grail: The Old French Arthurian Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in Translation, vol. 3 (New York: Garland, 1995), pp. 14–20.
Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, vol. 1: Laws against Images (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 402.
See G. J. C. Snoek, Medieval Piety from Relics to the Eucharist: A Process of Mutual Interaction (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995).
Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
R. C. Finucane, “Sacred Corpse, Profane Carrion: Social Ideals and Death Rituals in the Later Middle Ages,” in Joachim Whaley, ed., Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death (London: Europa, 1981), pp. 40–60.
Ellert Dahl, “Heavenly Images: The Statue of St. Foy of Conques and the Signification of the Medieval ‘Cult-Image’ in the West,” Acta ad archaeologiam et Artium historiam pertinentia 8 (Rome, 1979): 175–92.
Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).
Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1997), pp. 329–33.
For an example of such a procedure in regard to the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale, see Paul Strohm, “Chaucer’s Lollard Joke: History and the Textual Unconscious,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 17 (1995): 23–42
Christopher Norris, What’s Wrong with Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990)
Christopher Norris, Reclaiming Truth: Contribution to a Critique of Cultural Relativism (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1996)
Satya P. Mohanty, Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997)
David Simpson, The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature: A Report on Half Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)
Susan Haack, Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993)
Susan Haack, Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate: Unfashionable Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
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Patterson, L. (2006). Chaucer’s Pardoner on the Couch: Psyche and Clio in Medieval Literary Studies. In: Temporal Circumstances. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-08451-4_5
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