Historicists and Their Discontents: Reading Psychoanalytically in Medieval Studies

This essay takes as its point of departure the recent interest in psychoanalysis in medieval English literary studies. It addresses the vexed relations between psychoanalysis and history, in particular the concerns typically voiced by historicists discontent with what they see as a transhistorical, indeed even ahistorical, methodology. Here I seek to redress these concerns by connecting them with an earlier critical "flirtation" with Freud within historicism, as well as by articulating an unacknowledged continuity between these two critical moments. During this "in-between" period, from the mid- to late 1980s and into the late 1990s, historicism and psychoanalysis were largely treated as mutually exclusive discourses. To think psychoanalytically was precisely not to think historically and, by extension, politically. 1 However, between this initial flirtation and our current romance with psychoanalytically inflected models of thought--between what might be conceived as two different yet conscious engagements with Freudian and post-Freudian theory--also lies, I want to argue, an unconscious yet equally meaningful relationship between historicism and psychoanalysis. In the pages that follow I will disclose the central role psychoanalysis has played within medieval English literary historicism. Rather than positioning psychoanalysis over and against historicism or even simply renegotiating the priority of one over another, I will suggest how these ostensibly oppositional discourses necessarily inform each other. What I will ultimately argue here, more radically, is the necessity of psychoanalysis for historicist work.