Notes
1. I
analyze this passage at some length in my Romantic
Psychoanalysis 31-36, and again in my Afterword to a
forthcoming book, co-written with Woodman, entitled
Revelation and Knowledge. Woodman also reminded me
of the startling affinity between this episode in
Coleridge's life and Blake's mythologization of the
psychosomatics of Milton moving at once inspirationally and
with painful apocalyptic dread through Blake's bowels
("Bowlahoola") in that poem's remarkable scene of
psychoanalysis.
2. I quote here from the
published version of the poem, appended as part of preface
to Wordsworth's 1814 publication of The Excursion.
In the original manuscript Wordsworth speaks of the "fear
and awe" that "fall upon me often when I look / Into my
soul, into the soul of man – ," turning toward the
collective, yet via a psychoanalysis whose confrontation
with the unconscious is as much threateningly personal and
idiosyncratic as consolingly universal, the latter clearly
taking precedence by the time of the 1814 version, in which
the more obscure work of the soul (to borrow Ffytche's
term) is sublimated, intellectualized, and allegorized as
the collective social work of the universal "Mind." See my
discussion of the differences between version of the
Prospectus in Romantic Psychoanalysis 91-97.
3. For histories of this
emergence in the period, see Ellenberger and Shorter. The
1980s and 1990s saw a surge in work on the history of
psychiatry in the wake of Foucault, but also the
foundational research of McAlpine, Hunter, Porter and
others. A 1990 article by Andrew Scull schematizes this
work in terms of a tension between history and
historiography–the way psychiatry writes its own
history. Proceeding on what Scull calls the "firm and
neutral ground of value-free natural science" (239), it
produced "sanitized" histories of the field in which the
spirit of progress guides psychiatry's move toward its own
absolute knowledge: the cure of souls in the name of the
public good and scientific fact. Foucault's Madness and
Civilization radically challenged the rules of this
game, though his historiography came under attack, a
problem redressed, Scull argues, through the more
"comparative" (242) approach of recent psychiatric
historiography, which proceeds in the spirit thought not
always the letter of anti-psychiatry. Writing psychiatric
history otherwise, it combines Foucault's hermeneutics of
suspicion with a firmer grasp of socio-historical
specificity. Call it the New Psychiatry. Part of this
effort is to nuance how later eighteenth-century culture
produces psychiatry from its own desire to naturalize its
citizenship among the disciplines. Scull links this desire
more to the nineteenth century, whereas I would locate it
earlier in the eighteenth century.
4. Here I want to mention
the work of Shorter, again, but also Ingram, Faubert,
Burwick, and of course Porter, whose Mind Forg'd
Manacles is in many ways the ur-text of Romantic
psychiatric historiography.
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