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the analogy between the medieval inquisitors and psychoanalysts is telling. For in the same year that Freud wrote to Fliess in order to suggest the applicability of the inquisitorial model to psychoanalysis, he famously altered his idea about what lay behind neurosis. 37 No longer would he claim that the etiology of disease included historical instances of childhood seduction; rather these instances
into vogue, the current mood of literary and historical studies could still best be called ‘critical’. Medieval studies is no different – fabulous narratives, like the subjects of psychoanalysis, are treated as ‘symptomatic fictions laid out for diagnosis’. 48 Questions of belief or affect are broken down to reveal hidden aetiologies. As Rita Felski has pointed out, the suspicious stance of
apparently disparate terms: ‘We should have to study together, genetically and structurally, the history of the road and the history of writing.’2 He makes a similar comment a year later, this time in the context of a discussion of the work of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, proposing that ‘writing as the possibility of the road and of difference, the history of writing and the history of the road’, should be ‘meditated upon’ together.3 Both comments occur in very different contexts (psychoanalysis and writing; anthropology and writing). Each context provides some
. Here my argument will be constructed around two sorts of theory equally concerned with problems of order: medieval physiology and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Integrating historical conceptualisation with modern conceptualisation deepens both, for it allows the historical specificities of the texts MUP_McDonald_06_Ch5 102 11/20/03, 14:24 The King of Tars 103 under discussion and of the discussion itself to emerge more sharply. Finally, important ideological issues are clarified through detailed textual comparison of the Auchinleck text with the Vernon, another of
‘Minerva’ are all associated with the city, two in the Troilus and one in the ‘Legend of Dido’ – which of course begins after the siege and the assault have ceased at Troy: ‘Whan Troye brought was to destruccioun / By Grekes sleyghte, and namely by Synoun, / Feynynge the hors offered unto Mynerve’ (Legend of Good Women, lines 930–3). On Chaucer’s suppression of Troy in the Book of the Duchess, see also Smith, ‘Plague, panic space’, pp. 388–90; and for a different symptomatic reading of this catalogue, L. O. Aranye Fradenburg, Sacrifice Your Love: Psychoanalysis
– from aversion to self-abasing admiration, from gratitude to resentment, from frustration to fascination’. 20 Alternately, the terms ‘intimacy’ and ‘intimate’ often circulate, in a supporting role, around and within the analysis of specific affects and their social fields. In Sara Ahmed's groundbreaking The promise of happiness , for example, we hear about the ‘intimacy of desire and anxiety’ as taught by psychoanalysis
. 38 Neuse, 1991 : 9, 14, 116-17; Hansen, 1992 : 27; Kendrick, 1988 :133; Leicester, 1990 : 89, 99; for criticisms of the dramatic approach, see Malone, 1951 : 186-201, Shumaker, 1951 , and Benson, 1986 ; for a critique of the psychoanalysis of fictional characters, see Walker, 1985 . 39
65 2 Queen Eleanor and her crosses: Trauma and memory, medieval and modern Although he was one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated ruinologists, Sigmund Freud gave medieval culture little attention in his writing. In the first of his ‘Five lectures on psychoanalysis’, however, Freud used a famous medieval monument to formulate his reflections on the dynamics of personal and collective identity: I should like to formulate what we have learned so far as follows: our hysterical patients suffer from reminiscences. Their symptoms are residues and mnemic
More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection (London: Tavistock, 1977); Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976); Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978); Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). 6 Galloway, ‘The Medieval Literary’, p. 1. 7 See the overview of the movement’s strands and development in Marjorie Levinson, ‘What is New Formalism?’, PMLA 122.2 (2007
Landauer, ‘Erwin Panofksy and the renascence of the Renaissance’, Renaissance Quarterly , 47 (1994), 255–81. 10 E.g., Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema , trans. Celia Britton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); Jean-Louis Baudry, ‘Ideological effects of the basic cinematographic