Masters of Financial Economics, ADEC 73601Dr. Danielle Zanza

Masters of Financial Economics, ADEC 73601
Dr. Danielle Zanzalari
Problem Set 2
2018
Please follow the instructions listed on your syllabus regarding
problem sets. I do not accept
late work. Email me with any questions you have.
1. Using the VNM utility function of U(Y ) = Y
1−λ
1−λ where you could win $10,000 with
probability 0.20 and lose $400 with probability 0.80 calculate
the following if λ = 0.3 and
Y = $2000:
a) The expected return of this lottery.
b) The relative risk aversion of this person.
c) The absolute risk aversion of this person.
d) The certainty equivalent. (Note: Follow the same set-up as
the notes. Essentially you
replace (E(Z)) with CE(Z), CE(Z) being the certainty
equivalent.)
2. Crosby is considering investing in the following tech
startups: African Water Nonprofit and
Boston GoodWill to Go. Crosby has the following VNM utility
function: U(Y ) = 30+Y − Y

2
200
where Y is in thousands. Crosby’s total income in $200,000 and
would have to invest $50,000
in African Water Nonprofit with a probability of success of 50%
and $75,000 in Boston
GoodWill to Go with a 65% chance of success. If these start-ups
are not successful he loses
all of his money, whereas if they are successful he will retain
his initial investment plus 10%
and 15% return of each respective company. So,
a) Will Crosby invest in either company?
b) Would a risk neutral person make this investment?
3. What is the risk preference of investors with the following
VNM utility functions?
a) U(Y ) =
√
Y
b) U(Y ) = Y 2
c) U(Y ) = ln(Y )
d) U(Y ) = 10Y + 18
e) U(Y ) = Y
1−λ
1−λ

1
4. Alex has a wealth of $175,000, no health insurance and
worker’s compensation does not
apply. Alex has a 10% chance of losing $52,000, which is the
probability he breaks his leg
sliding into second base in a baseball game and the amount of
money it would cost for hos-
pital bills, rehabilitation and loss of work for a week. His utility
function is: U(Y ) = Y
0.8
0.8
.
Blue Cross Blue Shield of NYC offers the following policies
and deductibles:
Insurance Premium Deductible
$4382 $1000
$4782 $500
$5502 $0
$3682 $1350
then which insurance policy (if any) will Alex choose and why?
5. Use the Condo Price excel spreadsheet, sourced from Zillow,
on the mean condo prices of
the top 10 cities in the U.S. to help you answer the following
questions. Please use Stata,
R, Matlab or Excel and submit your code along with your

answers written down.
a) Using the 10 cities in the Excel spreadsheet and the
assumption that house prices rise
on average 7% a year and mortgage costs are 6%. Our debt to
equity ratio is 4. Based
on what you calculate the expected return on our levered
investment to be and what
you view the house price of the following year, does it make
sense to buy a condo in
each of these cities and in each of these years? Do not calculate
this by each month.
Please just use year-06 numbers (i.e. Use numbers from June
each year for all
problems. So, use 2010-06 to estimate the expected return on
your levered investment
if you sold in 2011-06. Evaluate your expected return with the
actual return. Please
do this for each city and for 2010-2018.)
b) Now, let’s assume that we put down 5% in our condo in
Boston, Massachusetts and
borrow the rest. Our borrowing costs go up 8% since we must
pay PMI (an extra cost
for not putting down 20% equity). If we want to ensure we make
a return of 5% on our
levered investment, what must our expected return on our
unlevered investment be in
Boston, Massachusetts for each year? Does it make sense to do
a levered investment
then?
c) Look at Dallas-Fort-Worth, Texas, let’s assume that we put
10% down on our condo
and our borrowing costs are 5%. For what states of the world
(i.e. for what unlevered

return) does a levered investment not make sense?
d) Using the numbers you calculate above in part c., calculate
the risk of each Dallas-Fort
Worth investment assuming that the standard deviation of the
unlevered investment
is 2%.
e) (EXTRA CREDIT: 10 pts)Lastly, the expected return on our
levered investment does
not take into account the tax benefits of owning a condo (or
home). How would you
propose we consider the tax benefits in the home purchase
leverage equation we have
been discussing?
2
Chaucer's Pardoner on the Couch: Psyche and Clio in Medieval
Literary Studies
Author(s): Lee Patterson
Source: Speculum, Vol. 76, No. 3 (Jul., 2001), pp. 638-680
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the
Medieval Academy of
America
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2903882
Accessed: 15-05-2019 02:22 UTC
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Chaucer's Pardoner on the Couch:
Psyche and Clio in Medieval Literary Studies
By Lee Patterson

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 Wittgenstein1
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 essay is a contribution to that skepticism
as it applies to lit-
erary interpretation, a philosophically much narrower terrain
than Wittgenstein's
genial critique envisaged, but one in which fishy thinking is no
less to be avoided.
The essay 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. Part 2
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 part 3 I use an apposite test case that almost
irresistibly attracts psy-

choanalytic readings-Chaucer's Pardoner and his tale-to assess
the usefulness
or otherwise of psychoanalytic assumptions in literary
interpretation. Parts 4 and
5 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 essay concludes
with some reflections
on the place of theory-whether psychoanalytic or of some other
variety-in
medieval literary studies.
The goal of this essay is not to foreclose discussion but exactly
the opposite.
For an interpretive program to be taken seriously it must both
examine the foun-
This essay was first written for a symposium organized at the
University of Oklahoma by George
Economou in March 1996, and versions have subsequently been
given at various institutions, much
to its benefit. It has been read by six readers for Speculum, all
of whom-and especially those who
found it unworthy of publication-have helped me to clarify the
argument. I would like especially to
thank Richard Emmerson for his detailed and perceptive
comments, Michael Wenthe for his scrupulous
inspection of the last but one version, and Annabel Patterson
for her editorial brutality.
1 Cited by Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir,
2nd ed. (Oxford, 1984), p. 100.
Wittgenstein explained Freud's power in terms of the modern
commitment to the idea that the inner

self has uncharted depths: the "peculiar charm" of
psychoanalytic explanations, he said, derives from
"the idea of an underworld, a secret cellar" (Lectures and
Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology
and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett [Berkeley, Calif., 1966],
p. 25).
Speculum 76 (2001) 638
2019 02:22:27 UTC
Chaucer's Pardoner on the Couch
dations on which it rests and meet, with as full and receptive an
attitude as pos-
sible, the objections to which it is susceptible. I have tried
neither to travesty the
assumptions I question nor to score rhetorical points. I have
read as widely as I
could in the relevant material and seek here to present the
results in a straight-
forward manner, without misrepresentation. If this essay is to
serve as a way of
opening a discussion on the interpretive appropriateness of
psychoanalysis-a
conversation that is clearly long overdue-then one hopes that
those who disagree
with its conclusions will do the same.
1. THE FREUDIAN CHARM
We start our intellectual lives under the spell. Our vernacular

culture is saturated
with terms and concepts derived from psychoanalytic theory:
repression, resis-
tance, the unconscious, the anal personality, threatened
masculinity and castration
fear, a belief that our every activity is invested with libido, and
above all a suspicion
that everything means something other, and usually something
darker, than it
seems-these terms and concepts, and the way of thinking they
enable and en-
courage, are a central part of the shared habits of thought by
which we learn, for
good or ill, to make sense of our lives. More tangibly, our
society devotes sub-
stantial resources to mental health workers who deploy
technologies of the self
that derive ultimately if not directly from the Freudian system.
Quite apart from
the vast number of more or less professional therapists who
service what has been
called "the identity market,"2 there are school counselors,
penologists, expert wit-
nesses, social workers, and even (if they are not careful)
university professors who
dispense more or less expert advice that bears a real, if usually
ill-defined, relation
to Freudian theory. If the twentieth century has witnessed what
Philip Rieff has
called "the emergence of psychological man," we must
remember that we are not
merely observers of that momentous event but its effect.3 We
are psychological
men and women, shaped by structures of thought and feeling
that derive directly
from the work of Freud and his disciples.

But even while agreeing with the statement that the invention
and spread of
Freudian theory represent "the attainment of a new degree of
consciousness in
Western civilization," one may still ask if it is a higher form of
consciousness and,
in particular applications, whether it is a help or hindrance to
thought.4 There are,
to be sure, very good reasons for the modern triumph of
psychoanalytic modes of
thought and interpretation. For one thing, Freudianism
functioned for the first
half of the twentieth century as a liberatory alternative to far
less humane modes
of explaining human actions, especially geneticism (and its
deadly offspring, eu-
genics) and behaviorism. Particularly important in this regard
is the psychoana-
2 Peter L. Berger, "Towards a Sociological Understanding of
Psychoanalysis," Social Research 32
(1965), 26-41, at p. 37.
3 Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (Garden City,
N.Y., 1961), pp. 361-92.
4 Steven Marcus, Freud and the Culture of Psychoanalysis:
Studies in the Transition from Victorian
Humanism to Modernity (Boston, 1984), p. 7. For a similar,
highly influential account of Freudianism
as modernity, see 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, 1965), pp. 89-118.

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lytic refusal to pass moral judgment on almost all forms of
behavior, especially
sexual. As Freud said more than once, psychoanalysis has no
"concern whatsoever
with judgments of value."5 To be against psychoanalysis was,
from the period of
1920 to 1960 or so, to be against reforms in child rearing,
education, the treatment
of sexual minorities, and many other clearly progressive
causes.6 Another benign
aspect of Freudian psychologism has been its ability to address
(if not necessarily
to remedy) aspects of modern life-especially familial and other
interpersonal
relationships-that the dominant individualism and privatism of
modern urban
life, in which the self is experienced as threatened and fragile,
have made central
to a sense of well-being. Thus it is that "twentieth-century
societies have produced
'psychology' as a specialized form of knowledge and set of
techniques."7 And as
many have said, psychoanalysis has produced a humanistic
substitute for religion
in an increasingly secular culture. As Wittgenstein recognized,
Freud restored to

modernity some of the mystery that the disenchantments of
rationality were
threatening to strip away forever. In a world in which
everything is potentially
knowable to instrumental reason, psychoanalysis can satisfy a
Romantic desire
for a realm of deep meaning that is unknown and perhaps even
unknowable.
Whether it can now be seen to have achieved this without
imposing a new creed,
immune to empirical critique, is part of my concern.
If psychoanalysis can thus rightly be seen, in retrospect, as part
of the Enlight-
enment project of modernity, we are now in a position to assess
its claim to sci-
entific rationality and the ratification of that claim by its
inclusion within the
professional citadel of medicine.8 Freud always thought of
himself as a scientist
and of psychoanalysis as an empirical science. "I take no pride
in having avoided
speculation," he said, because "the material for my hypotheses
was collected by
the most extensive and laborious series of observations."9 He
speaks often of the
5 Cited by Philip Rieff, who rightly says that "psychoanalysis
is the first great system of therapy to
divorce itself from some moral aim or doctrine; that suggests
its historic importance" (Freud: The
Mind of the Moralist, p. 368). As Freud himself said, "Psycho-
analysis finds no occasion for conceal-
ments and hints, it does not think it necessary to be ashamed of
dealing with this important material,
it believes it is right and proper to call everything by its correct

name" (Introductory Lectures on
Psycho-Analysis [1915-16], in Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, 24 vols., trans. James Strachey et al. [London, 1953-74],
15:154). All subsequent references
are to this edition, abbreviated SE.
6 See Nathan G. Hale, Jr., The Rise and Crisis of
Psychoanalysis in America, 2: Freud and the
Americans, 1917-1985 (New York, 1995). Despite its
inflammatory and misleading title, Edwin Fuller
Torrey, Freudian Fraud: The Malignant Effect of Freud's
Theory on American Thought and Culture
(New York, 1992), provides a useful history of the
progressiveness of Freudian thought with a wealth
of specific examples, especially Margaret Mead and Benjamin
Spock.
7 Barry Richards, Images of Freud: Cultural Responses to
Psychoanalysis (London, 1989), p. 23.
8 For the combination of Romantic and Enlightenment features
in Freud's thought, see Harry Tros-
man, "Freud's Cultural Background," in John E. Gedo and
George H. Pollock, eds., Freud: The Fusion
of Science and Humanism (New York, 1976), pp. 46-70.
Psychoanalysis is both deterministic and
liberating: deterministic (in its Romantic mode) in that it
insists that all behaviors are caused by hidden,
powerful forces, liberating (in its Enlightenment mode) in
arguing that we can come to understand
and control those determining forces: see Richard Stevens,
Freud and Psychoanalysis: An Exposition
and Appraisal (New York, 1983), pp. 135-37.
9 "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria" (1905), SE

7:113. See also, for example, Intro-
ductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1916-17), SE 16:244-45.
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"data" and "factual evidence" upon which he has based his
explanations and
asserts throughout his work that "the intellect and the mind are
objects for sci-
entific research in exactly the same way as any non-human
things."10
But in recent decades psychoanalysis as a scientifically reliable
system of thought
has lost much of its intellectual status, and in the second part
of this essay I will
lay out the main arguments for its demise. This doubt has
spread even to the
popular press. The cover story of the November 29, 1993, issue
of Time magazine
was entitled "Is Freud Dead?" and the June 15, 1998, issue of
Der Spiegel-its
cover story entitled "Die Psycho Falle"-features a visual lineup
of similar mag-
azine covers from the United States, France, and Germany.11
The most persistent
attempt to counter this widespread disillusionment is to argue
that Freud's claims

to the scientific status of his theories stemmed from what Paul
Ricoeur has called
his "scientistic self-misunderstanding," and that psychoanalysis
should therefore
be understood not as an empirical science but simply as a
hermeneutic, a method
of interpretation.12 But such a tactic has to accept (as does
Ricoeur) the fact that
because "psychoanalysis is itself a work of speech with the
patient," then the most
it needs to produce is a narrative that the patient finds
acceptable, whether it is
accurate or not.13 The hermeneutic rescue of psychoanalysis,
in other words, de-
nies Freud his claim to have discovered the causes of human
behavior and settles
for meanings "discovered" by the analyst: in the attempt to
rescue psychoanalysis
as a therapy, it destroys it as a general theory of human
behavior. The fact is, if
psychoanalysis is to provide a reliable paradigm for
understanding human behav-
ior-especially premodern behavior, and all the more the
behavior of characters
created by premodern writers-then it must not be denied its
claim to scientific
truth. As Freud himself said, "I have always felt it as a gross
injustice that people
have refused to treat psycho-analysis like any other science."14
10 New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1933), SE
22:159. Freud continues with an ar-
gument that practitioners of psychoanalytic criticism might
find unpalatable: "It is not permissible to

declare that science is one field of human mental activity and
that religion and philosophy are others,
at least equal in value, and that science has no business to
interfere with the other two. ... A view of
this kind is regarded as particularly superior, tolerant, broad-
minded and free from illiberal prejudices.
Unfortunately it is not tenable.... It is simply a fact that the
truth cannot be tolerant" (p. 160).
1 Der Spiegel 25 (1998), 199.
12 Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on
Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven,
Conn., 1970).
13 The citation from Ricoeur is from Freud and Philosophy, p.
369. The hermeneutic interpretations
of Ricoeur and Jiirgen Habermas are subjected to a withering
analysis by Adolf Griinbaum, The
Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique
(Berkeley, Calif., 1984), pp. 1-94. See also
the comments by the psychoanalyst Robert R. Holt, Freud
Reappraised: A Fresh Look at Psychoan-
alytic Theory (New York, 1989), p. 337, and by the textual
critic Sebastiano Timpanaro, The Freudian
Slip: Psychoanalysis and Textual Criticism, trans. Kate Soper
(London, 1976). For Timpanaro, the
hermeneutic rescue of Freud manages only to transform
"psychoanalysis into a pastiche of Husserl or
Heidegger, orienting it towards a mysticism that evokes Jung
much more than Freud" (p. 17). Tim-
panaro later characterizes Ricoeur's version of Freud as "a
strange brew of Freudianism and religion,
in which the more imbued with mystery an interpretation, the
better it pleases" (p. 181)-a version
of Wittgenstein's point (n. 1, above).

14 An Autobiographical Study (1925), SE 20:58. The other way
of protecting Freudianism from its
own claims is to declare that the practices and results of
empirical science are no longer operative in
the brave new world of postmodernism: see Paul Robinson,
Freud and His Critics (Berkeley, Calif.,
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2019 02:22:27 UTC
Moreover, even the hermeneutic model-which is now
therapeutically domi-
nant-requires a dialogue between analyst and patient in which
the patient's con-
tribution is acknowledged as essential. As the object-relations
analyst Heinz Kohut
has said, "If there is one lesson that I have learned during my
life as an analyst,
it is the lesson that what my patients tell me is likely to be
true-that many times
when I believed that I was right and my patients were wrong, it
turned out, though
often only after a prolonged search, that my rightness was
superficial whereas
their rightness was profound."15 But while this may be true for
real people in
contemporary therapy, such a dialogue is impossible with
persons, either real or

fictional, who can only give evidence of their psyches in fixed
texts. George Pig-
man, who is both a literary critic and a practicing analyst, has
pointed out that
"patients can object to interpretations and thereby further
understanding; texts
and documents cannot. [As used by literary critics], applied
psychoanalysis is
therefore barred from the feature of the psychoanalytic process
which gives the
greatest confidence in the validity of interpretations and
reconstructions."16
Yet despite the adjustments within the therapeutic community,
the now large
literature criticizing the truth claims of Freud and his
followers, and the reasonably
well informed discussions in the popular press, the news of the
demise of psycho-
analysis as a reliable mode of inquiry seems not to have
reached the small circle
of academic literary and cultural criticism. Here psychoanalysis
in its various
guises-whether as orthodox Freudianism or in Lacanian or post-
Lacanian revi-
sionary forms-remains not just a powerful influence but a
paradigm for inter-
pretation and a largely unquestioned source of authority.
According to a survey
done in 1977-78 of the most heavily cited twentieth-century
authors in the arts
and humanities, Freud was by far the most common name to
appear.17 Over
twenty years later the situation has not changed: in the decade
of the 1990s, at
least 921 books, and who knows how many articles, have been

published that
deal explicitly and centrally with psychoanalysis and literature,
to say nothing of
1993), and Marcus R. Bowman, "On the Idea of Natural
Science as a Resistance to Psychoanalysis,"
Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought 19 (1996), 371-402.
Both these authors use the familiar
psychoanalytic strategy of psychoanalyzing their opponents,
while the topic at issue is defended not
by appeals to evidence but by the assumption that it is true. As
Karl Kraus said as long ago as 1913
in exasperation with his psychoanalytically besotted friends,
"If I tell them they can kiss my ass, I must
have an anal predilection.... They have caught me!" (cited and
translated by Jacques Bouveresse,
Wittgenstein Reads Freud: The Myth of the Unconscious, trans.
Carol Cosman [Princeton, N.J., 1995],
p. 16).
15 Heinz Kohut, How Does Analysis Cure? (Chicago, 1984),
pp. 93-94; cited by G. W. Pigman III,
"Applied Psychoanalysis Today," Criticism 34 (1992), 299-315,
at p. 308.
16 Ibid., p. 309. For similar demurrals, see Gail S. Reed,
"Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalysis Appropri-
ated, Psychoanalysis Applied," Psychoanalytic Quarterly 54
(1985), 234-69, and Peter Lamarque,
"On the Irrelevance of Psychoanalysis to Literary Criticism," in
Peter Clark and Crispin Wright, eds.,
Mind, Psychoanalysis and Science (Oxford, 1988), pp. 257-73.
17 Allan Megill, "The Reception of Foucault by Historians,"
Journal of the History of Ideas 48
(1987), 117-41, at pp. 139-40. Freud was cited 966 times, with

the next name being that of Roland
Barthes, cited 678 times. It should be pointed out that Lenin
led the list with 1,737 citations; but if
Soviet journals were excluded, his name virtually disappeared.
Jung's name appeared 338 times, and
Lacan's 210.
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2019 02:22:27 UTC
all the critical writing in which psychoanalytic categories
remain implicit and
therefore invisible to search engines.18
It might be thought that medieval studies, with its traditional
commitment to
empiricist methodologies and its mistrust of explicitly
nonhistoricist interpretive
paradigms, would be resistant to this trend. But medieval
literary critics have long
been anxious not to be perceived as intellectually backward,
and the most obvious
way to avoid that stigma is to display familiarity with some
form of what the
literary academy currently designates as theory. In a recent
review article Louise
Fradenburg announces that "psychoanalysis is simply in
medieval studies now"
and provides a bibliography that includes some 45 items that

explicitly depend
upon psychoanalytic theories.19 One could easily add to the
list.20 There are few
critics, especially those dealing explicitly with questions of
gender and sexuality,
who do not at least implicitly accept the Freudian account of
sexual formation.
I have now turned, obviously, to a field-specific interrogation
of Freudianism-
very field-specific, since I do not address the use of Freudian
theory in literary
studies in general but rather as a fairly recent development
within medieval studies.
In literary studies generally, or in literary theory, there has
been more interest,
perhaps, in psychoanalysis as a kind of hermeneutics, as a
model for doing inter-
pretation rather than as a model of behavior. But in medieval
studies there has
been a rush backwards, as it were, to Freud's beliefs about
human sexuality and
its dominance as a force in character formation and pathology.
An example from
Chaucer studies, taken almost at random, is the discussion of
the Miller's Tale by
Elaine Tuttle Hansen, who argues that the tale commodifies
women, expresses a
"horror" of their sexuality, and bespeaks a profound if
unrecognized homoso-
ciality/homosexuality.21 The presuppositions that enable this
condemnatory read-
ing derive ultimately, if unwittingly, from Freud. According to
Hansen, grabbing
18 This figure was arrived at through a keyword search of the

database of the WorldCat (http://
newfirstsearch.oclc.org).
19 "Analytical Survey 2: We Are Not Alone: Psychoanalytic
Medievalism," New Medieval Litera-
tures 2 (1998), 249-76.
20 In addition to the titles provided by Fradenburg, a sample of
recent books that apply psychoan-
alytic categories of interpretation to cultural materials includes
Jane Chance, ed., Gender and Text in
the Later Middle Ages (Gainesville, Fla., 1996); E. Jane Burns,
Bodytalk: When Women Speak in Old
French Literature (Philadelphia, 1993); Gregory B. Stone, The
Death of the Troubadour: The Late
Medieval Resistance to the Renaissance (Philadelphia, 1994);
Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, and
James A. Schultz, eds., Constructing Medieval Sexuality,
Medieval Cultures 11 (Minneapolis, 1997);
Catherine S. Cox, Gender and Language in Chaucer
(Gainesville, Fla., 1997); Karma Lochrie, Covert
Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia,
1999); Clare A. Lees, ed., Medieval Mascu-
linities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, Medieval Cultures
7 (Minneapolis, 1994); Jeffrey Jerome
Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler, eds., Becoming Male in the Middle
Ages, Garland Reference Library of
the Humanities 2066, New Middle Ages 4 (New York, 1997);
John Carmi Parsons and Bonnie Wheeler,
eds., Medieval Mothering, Garland Reference Library of the
Humanities 1979, New Middle Ages 3
(New York, 1996), pp. 63-75, 183-99; Kathleen Biddick, The
Shock of Medievalism (Durham, N.C.,
1998); Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and
Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Dur-
ham, N.C., 1999); Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Of Giants: Sex,

Monsters, and the Middle Ages, Medieval
Cultures 17 (Minneapolis, 1999); Dyan Elliott, Fallen Bodies:
Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology
in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 1999); and Paul Strohm,
England's Empty Throne: Usurpation and
the Language of Legitimation, 1399-1422 (New Haven, Conn.,
1998).
21 Elaine Tuttle Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender
(Berkeley, Calif., 1992), pp. 223-36.
643
2019 02:22:27 UTC
644 Chaucer's Pardoner on the Couch
the red-hot iron from the forge is Absolon's attempt to reassert
his masculinity,
and his desire to hurt Alison implies a connection among
homosexuality, homo-
phobia, and misogyny. But this reasonable explanation of a
fabliau's typically
coarse revenge is expressed as follows: "the boy-child
[Absolon] has in this case
felt, although not seen, the lack that seems to mark the place of
women's sexual
organs, and his response indicates both guilt and fear for his
own as yet unproven
difference and dominance, his phallus."22 This reading
depends, then, upon
Freud's theory that oedipalized men are by definition appalled

by female sexuality.
Thus for Hansen the Miller's Tale "effects the conventional
association or confla-
tion of (female) genital and anal functions, of women's sex (or
sex with a woman)
and dirt, decay, and dissolution."23
My point here is to suggest that this and similar readings of
medieval texts,
while they may be invigoratingly consistent with the political
temper of the times,
may also be intellectually misleading-for at least three reasons.
First, they ignore
the now ubiquitous skepticism about the truth claims of the
very theories they
take as presuppositions. Second, they extend what is now
accepted as a dialogic
method of therapy to a one-way analysis of fictional characters
who must stand
mute before their analyst. And third, they rise to the defense of
their method by
attacking another method of understanding literary texts from
the past-histor-
icism.24 What they actually attack, however, is a parodic
version of historicism, a
22 Ibid., p. 230.
23 Ibid., p. 227; italics added. A similar reading of the Miller's
Tale is offered by Karma Lochrie,
"Women's 'Pryvetees' and Fabliau Politics in the Miller's Tale,"
Exemplaria 6 (1994), 287-304. This
argument depends in the first instance upon Gayle Rubin's
classic essay, "The Traffic in Women: Notes
on the 'Political Economy' of Sex," in Rayna R. Reiter, ed.,

Toward an Anthropology of Women (New
York, 1975), pp. 157-210. Rubin reinterprets Levi-Strauss's
analysis of kinship in terms of the Freud-
ian account of "the Oedipal complex [as] a machine which
fashions the appropriate forms of sexual
individuals" (Rubin, p. 189). Both Lochrie and Hansen thus
rely on two assumptions: that Freud's
account of the creation of sexual identity by means of the
Oedipus complex is true; and that, in Rubin's
words, "the paleolithic relations of sexuality are still with us"
(p. 191)-i.e., that the political economy
of the sex/gender system that Rubin derives from Freud is a
universal constituent of human societies,
be it late-medieval England or the contemporary United States.
24 Many people have offered workable definitions of historicist
methodology; my own attempt may
be found in Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding
of Medieval Literature (Madison,
Wis., 1987), pp. 3-74. An excellent summary of recent work,
with examples, may be found in Kiernan
Ryan, ed., New Historicism and Cultural Materialism: A
Reader (London, 1996); see especially pp.
43-44. A classic defense of psychoanalytic literary criticism
can be found in Peter Brooks, "The Idea
of a Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism," in Shlomith Rimmon-
Kenan, ed., Discourse in Psychoanalysis
and Literature, University Paperbacks 960 (London, 1987), pp.
1-18, and Psychoanalysis and Sto-
rytelling, Bucknell Lectures in Literary Theory 10 (Oxford,
1994). Brooks acknowledges that any
psychoanalytic criticism worthy of the name must take the
Freudian account of the mind as a privileged
model that reveals the central truth of human behavior. This
means, in Brooks's words, accepting "the
psychoanalytic view of humans as radically determined by

sexuality.... Human desire emerges subject
to the 'laws' dictated by the castration complex and the Oedipal
triangle-emerges, that is, as desire
inhabited by loss and prohibition" (Psychoanalysis and
Storytelling, p. 25). In "'Be Not Far from Me':
Psychoanalysis, Medieval Studies and the Subject of Religion,"
Exemplaria 7 (1995), 41-54, Louise
O. Fradenburg defends the relevance of psychoanalysis to
medieval studies by asserting that "psycho-
analysis takes us to the heart of our histories of loss and desire,
to the heart of the history of culture,
or 'civilization,' as a history of the production and regulation of
pleasure and loss" (p. 44)-a statement
that is another version of Brooks's account. But neither
Fradenburg nor Brooks confronts the critiques
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Chaucer's Pardoner on the Couch 645
naive positivism that believes in the absolute "alterity" of the
past. Such a histor-
icism has not been thought possible since at least Nietzsche,
Dilthey, and Weber,
let alone Foucault, Jameson, and E. P. Thompson.25 Constantly
to invoke D. W.
Robertson and a few of his students as proof of the
benightedness of medieval
historicism is misleading in a double sense: it is blind to the
very different kinds
of historicism that medieval literary scholars now practice, and
it dismisses the

very real contribution to our understanding of the Middle Ages
that Robertson
made, since he taught us much about the ubiquity of the
medieval tradition of
exegetical reading.
Another line of defense-as-attack is to psychoanalyze
historicists as reverent if
mournful seekers after a hopelessly lost past, a strategy that
reduces the many
different motives that inspire historical scholarship to
compensation for a psycho-
analytically posited "lack."26 This move endows the analyst
with the assurance
that she understands others better than they can understand
themselves. The
charge, however, not only begs the question but depends on an
assumed identity
of memory and history. As a psychic phenomenon, memory is a
mental function
confined to personal experience; as a disciplinary practice,
history is an episte-
mological effort directed toward the experience of others, all of
whom are (for
the medievalist) dead. We cannot now remember the medieval
past but only learn
about it. And even as a collective phenomenon, memory both
extends back only
a short way into the past and has to do, as is well illustrated by
the monumental
of psychoanalytic theory that have appeared over the last
twenty-five years. A defense of psychoanalysis
as an aid to historical understanding is provided by Peter Gay,
Freud for Historians (New York, 1985),
but Gay does little to counter the arguments of David E.

Stannard, Shrinking History: On Freud and
the Failure of Psychohistory (New York, 1980). For a thorough
critique of Gay's version of Freud that
is itself sympathetic to psychoanalysis, see John E. Toews,
"Historicizing Psychoanalysis: Freud in His
Time and for Our Time," Journal of Modern History 63 (1991),
504-45.
25 This accusation has been most persistently made by Louise
Fradenburg, from her initial creation
of the straw man of historicist backwardness in "Criticism,
Anti-Semitism, and the Prioress's Tale,"
Exemplaria 1 (1989), 69-115, through to her most recent work
in "We Are Not Alone: Psychoanalytic
Medievalism." There she posits an opposition between those
unnamed scholars who "still insist on
the radical alterity of the past, the incommunication of
epistemes, and the uselessness of generalizing
about the 'local' and the 'specific"' and the psychoanalytic
medievalists who avoid those errors and
thus possess "a better understanding of the ethical and political
commitments of medievalist practice"
(pp. 262-63, my italics).
26 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, 1994), pp. 82-88, 100-107;
and Biddick's Shock of Medievalism,
which founds itself on Fradenburg's claims. Even Peter Gay
admits that "the days are gone when the
followers of Freud can discredit rational criticism by
psychoanalyzing the critic" (Freud for Historians,
p. 7). Yet on the very next page he refers to historians who
reject psychoanalytic methods as "anxious

and therefore hostile" (p. 8) and later asserts that "the
unflagging ardor of the counterattacks is
therefore a symptom rather than a necessary response" (p. 17).
The same tactic appears in Jonathan
Lear, Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul
(Cambridge, Mass., 1998), pp. 16-32. As
Freud himself said, "One of the first applications of psycho-
analysis was to teach us to understand the
opposition offered to us by our contemporaries because we
practised psycho-analysis" (New Intro-
ductory Lectures, SE 22:145).
2019 02:22:27 UTC
project led by Pierre Nora, primarily with the definition of the
modern nation.27
As for the recent argument that historicism is doomed to "the
task of replicating,
however hopelessly, medieval culture's self-understandings,"
while psychoanaly-
sis, from a superior posture, explores "the ways in which
medieval culture might
have misunderstood itself," one must ask how to recognize a
misunderstanding
without already knowing what correct understanding might
be.28 Like old-fash-
ioned Marxism, psychoanalysis wants to believe that it has a
pipeline to the truth,
the only difference being that the Marxist's long-abandoned
"false consciousness"

is here replaced by the psychoanalyst's gentler
"misunderstanding" or (Zizek's use
of Lacan's term) "misrecognition."29
To mention Slavoj Zizek will alert my readers to the fact that
what follows-a
summary of the arguments against psychoanalysis both as
method and as expla-
nation-is focused almost exclusively on Freud. It could be
objected that I am
aiming at the wrong target because the current psychoanalytic
theory of choice is
that propounded by Jacques Lacan or what is termed "post-
Lacanian psycho-
analysis," particularly as proposed by Ziiek. But Lacan rightly
insisted that his
entire project was a "return to Freud," and as Malcolm Bowie
has said, in what
is probably the best guide to this obscurantist writer, Lacan's
"loyalty to Freud is
intense, and the originality he seeks is that of an inspired and
devoted reader, one
who can think fruitfully only from inside someone else's
text."30 This is not to say
that Lacan's relation to Freud is not complex and shifting, nor
that he does not
finally differ from Freud in ways important to psychoanalytic
theory, perhaps most
significantly in locating within the ego itself a powerful
irrationality-he refers to
it at one point as an "organization of the passions"31-and in his
promotion of
language as an impersonal force that constructs subjectivity.
But the entire Lacan-
ian project is located within the context of the Freudian model
of the formation

of the personality. Lacan's four fundamental concepts of
psychoanalysis are the
unconscious, repetition, transference, and the drive;
subjectivity is formed through
infantile experience; and the lack that constitutes desire is a
function of the fear
of castration created by the Name of the Father. Like Freud,
Lacan presented his
work as at once scientific (despite his disdain for evidence) and
universalist. Ad-
mittedly, given his replacement of Freud's id, ego, and
superego with his ontolog-
27 Pierre Nora, ed., Les lieux de memoire, 3 vols. in 7 (Paris,
1984-92). There are clear if unremarked
affinities between Fradenburg's claims and Nora's project, with
its emphasis on the sadness of the
postmodern that has lost a living connection to the past and its
promotion of the postmodern historian
who both "meditate[s]" on his "personal liaison" with the past
and makes it "not the obstacle, but
the means of his understanding" (cited by Jeremy D. Popkin,
"Historians on the Autobiographical
Frontier," American Historical Review 104 [1999], 725-48, at
p. 731). But both Fradenburg and
Nora are stating positions that are hardly postmodern: they
have been familiar since at least the
Romantic historiography of Michelet and the historical
hermeneutics of Dilthey.
28 "Be Not Far from Me," pp. 45, 47.
29 Slavoj Ziiek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London,
1989), pp. 55-84.
30 Malcolm Bowie, Lacan (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), p. 7. For
other accounts of Lacan's theories

within their Freudian framework, see Jean Laplanche and Jean-
Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of
Psycho-analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York,
1973), and Samuel Weber, Return to
Freud: Jacques Lacan's Dislocation of Psychoanalysis, trans.
Michael Levine, Literature, Culture, The-
ory 1 (Cambridge, Eng., 1991).
31 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan
(New York, 1977), p. 19.
646
2019 02:22:27 UTC
ical triad of the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real, Lacan is more
truly a metaphy-
sician (or theologian) than a psychologist. But if the Freudian
foundations on
which his work rests are unreliable, then his own enterprise
(however we define
it) can hardly stand as an accurate account of human
behavior.32 As for Zizek, his
neo-Lacanian psychoanalysis of culture has a political and
sociological interest
that is lacking in Lacan himself. But his unqualified
commitment to Lacanian
categories renders his work equally dependent-at one remove-
on Freud.33 It is
with Freud that psychoanalysis begins and ends (as Freud

himself rightly predicted
it always would), and it is thus with Freud that the literary
critic must come to
terms. In any case, as the psychoanalyst Robert Holt has said,
"When the foun-
dations of our house are tottering, it makes no sense to argue
about rival designs
for new wallpaper."34
2. THE CASE AGAINST PSYCHOANALYSIS
For the last quarter of a century much of Freud's work, and
hence psychoan-
alytic theory as a whole (as opposed to the many varieties of
psychotherapy now
on offer), has been subject to a devastating critique. According
to Frederick Crews,
the one anti-Freudian known at least by reputation to literary
scholars, "there is
literally nothing to be said, scientifically or therapeutically, to
the advantage of
the entire Freudian system or any of its component dogmas."35
Those are strong
words, but they are supported by a substantial and growing
body of work that
has demolished, both systematically and in detail, the
theoretical and institutional
house that Freud built. This work can no longer be ignored or
evaded by literary
critics.36
32 Criticisms of Lacan as severe as those leveled against Freud
are not far to seek: see, for instance,
FranSois Roustang, The Lacanian Delusion, trans. Greg Sims
(New York, 1990); Luc Ferry and Alain
Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on

Antihumanism, trans. Mary H. S. Cattani
(Amherst, Mass., 1990), pp. 185-207; and an article posted on
the Web by Norman N. Holland,
"The Trouble(s) with Lacan" (1998), at
http://web.clas.ufl.edu/users/nnh/lacan.htm.
33 Ziiek's Lacanian commitments are everywhere visible in his
work, but perhaps nowhere more
explicitly than in the essay "Fetishism and Its Vicissitudes," in
The Plague of Fantasies (London, 1997),
pp. 86-126.
34 Freud Reappraised, p. 338.
35 Frederick Crews, "The Verdict on Freud," Psychological
Science 7 (1996), 63-68, at p. 63; Crews
is reviewing Malcolm Macmillan, Freud Evaluated: The
Completed Arc (Amsterdam, 1991). Crews's
own contributions to this critique may be found in Skeptical
Engagements (New York, 1986);
Crews et al., The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute
(New York, 1995); and Crews, ed., Unau-
thorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend (New York, 1998).
36 Many of the most troubling doubts about psychoanalysis are
expressed by psychoanalysts them-
selves. For example, Donald P. Spence begins his book The
Rhetorical Voice of Psychoanalysis: Dis-
placement of Evidence by Theory (Cambridge, Mass., 1994),
with the following statement: "As psy-
choanalysis prepares to enter its second century, we are force d
to realize that it is not much closer to
being a science than it was when Freud first invented the
discipline.... Rather than representing an
earnest and possibly fallible attempt to tell a true story about
the world, psychoanalytic theory may

function much more as a shared fantasy that binds its followers
in a common belief system and protects
them from uncertainty and doubt" (pp. 1, 4-5). For other
accounts of the current state of psycho-
analysis by practicing analysts, see Marshall Edelson,
Psychoanalysis: A Theory in Crisis (Chicago,
1988); Holt, Freud Reappraised; and Paul Kline, Psychology
and Freudian Theory: An Introduction
(London, 1984).
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2019 02:22:27 UTC
To begin with, psychoanalytic theory makes universalist and
absolutist claims
that call for a large body of evidentiary support that it has
never been able to
provide. Freud insisted that all neuroses are caused by sexual
dysfunctions that
originate in infancy, and his emphasis upon both the primacy of
early childhood
and the sexual nature of identity formation remains central to
psychoanalytic
thinking. As he said in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900),
"The theory of the
psychoneuroses asserts as an indisputable and invariable fact
that only sexual
wishful impulses from infancy . . . furnish the motive force for
the formation of

psycho-neurotic symptoms of every kind."37 Similarly, Freud
used his (admittedly
failed) analysis of Dora to claim that "sexuality . . . provides
the motive power
for every single symptom, and for every single manifestation of
a symptom. The
symptoms of the disease are nothing else than the patient's
sexual activity.... I
can only repeat over and over again-for I never find it
otherwise-that sexuality
is the key to the problem of the psychoneuroses and of the
neuroses in general."38
Again, Freud repeatedly insisted that the Oedipus complex is a
universal phenom-
enon: "Every new arrival on this planet is faced by the task of
mastering the
Oedipus complex; anyone who fails to do so falls a victim to
neurosis. With the
progress of psycho-analytic studies the importance of the
Oedipus complex has
become more and more clearly evident; its recognition has
become the shibboleth
that distinguishes the adherents of psycho-analysis from its
opponents."39 And for
Freud the Oedipus complex entailed as well the inevitability of
the castration
complex, a condition whose resolution determines gender
identity.40
Freud actually went so far as to claim that the central events of
infantile expe-
rience were already present in the little boy as an ancestral
inheritance, so he did
not need to experience them at all for them to have their effect
upon him: "These
scenes of observing parental intercourse, of being seduced in

childhood, and of
being threatened with castration are unquestionably an
inherited endowment, a
phylogenetic heritage.... A child catches hold of this
phylogenetic experience
where his own experience fails him. He fills in the gaps in
individual truth with
37 SE 5:605-6; my italics.
38 "A Case of Hysteria," SE 7:114-15; the italics in the phrase
"the patient's sexual activity" are
Freud's, while the others are mine.
39 "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality" (1905), SE 7:226
n (a footnote added in 1920; my
italics). Freud concluded Totem and Taboo (1913) by
"insist[ing] that ... the beginnings of religion,
morals, society and art converge in the Oedipus complex" (SE
13:156). For discussions of the way in
which post-Freudian psychoanalysis has revised and rerevised
(but never discarded) the theory of the
Oedipus complex, see Bennett Simon, "Is the Oedipus Complex
Still the Cornerstone of Psychoanal-
ysis? Three Obstacles to Answering the Question," Journal of
the American Psychoanalytic Associa-
tion 39 (1991), 641-68, and Bennett Simon, "'Incest-See under
Oedipus Complex': The History of
an Error in Psychoanalysis," Journal of the American
Psychoanalytic Association 40 (1992), 955-88.
In The Sublime Object of Ideology Zizek says: "Let us take one
of the commonplaces of the Marxist-
feminist criticism of psychoanalysis, the idea that its insistence
on the crucial role of the Oedipus
complex and the nuclear-family triangle transforms a
historically conditioned form of patriarchal

family into a feature of the universal human condition: is not
this effort to historicize the family triangle
precisely an attempt to elude the 'hard kernel' which announces
itself through the 'patriarchal family'-
the Real of the Law, the rock of castration?" (p. 50; italics in
original).
40 See SE 20:38 and Allen Esterson, Seductive Mirage: An
Exploration of the Work of Sigmund
Freud (Chicago, 1993), p. 137.
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prehistoric truth; he replaces occurrences in his own life by
occurrences in the life
of his ancestors .... Wherever experiences fail to fit in with the
hereditary schema,
they become remodelled in the imagination.... We are often
able to see the
schema triumphing over the experience of the individual."41
Moreover, Freud
claimed that the mind never forgot any experience, that
everything was recover-
able: "All of the essentials are preserved; even things that seem
completely for-
gotten are present somehow and somewhere.... It depends only
upon analytic
technique whether we shall succeed in bringing what is

concealed completely to
light."42 Similarly, for Freud all dreams, including those that
cause anxiety, were
"a (disguised) fulfillment of a (suppressed or repressed)
wish."43 And so on: all of
the central tenets of the psychoanalytic system were presented
by Freud as both
universal and empirically demonstrable. As his collaborator
Josef Breuer put it,
Freud was "a man given to absolute and exclusive
formulations."44
This way of proceeding has created predictable problems for
both Freud and
his disciples. Evidence supportive of Freud's theories is almost
entirely derived
from the analytic session itself, "clinical" material which-as
Adolf Griinbaum
has shown in detail-is so contaminated by the presuppositions
and suggestive-
ness of the analytic session as to be useless for purposes of
confirmation.45 What
extraclinical evidence exists argues strongly against Freudian
theory. The central
tenets of the psychoanalytic system, the Oedipus complex and
the theory of in-
fantile sexuality upon which it is based, are without evidentiary
support of any
kind. Empirical studies have shown that young children of both
sexes feel closer
to the mother than the father and that as children mature, each
sex tends to
identify with the same sex parent, not out of fear of the other
but out of affection
and a desire for emulation.46 As for the retention of all
experience within memory,

empirical studies have shown that memory is in fact a highly
malleable mental
function by means of which people construct personal pasts to
accord with present
41 "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis," 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,
Eng., 1970), pp. 471-99, at p. 481. For
Freud's Lamarckian materialism, which led him to believe that
acquired characteristics can be inher-
ited, see Frank J. Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind:
Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend, rev. ed.
(Cambridge, Mass., 1992).
42 "Constructions in Analysis" (1937), SE 23:260.
43 Interpretation of Dreams (1900), SE 4:160.
44 Breuer's characterization is cited by Esterson, Seductive
Mirage, p. 5.
45 Griinbaum, Foundations of Psychoanalysis, pp. 95-172;
Griinbaum, Validation in the Clinical
Theory of Psychoanalysis: A Study in the Philosophy of
Psychoanalysis (Madison, Conn., 1993).
46 See, e.g., Spence, Rhetorical Voice of Psychoanalysis, pp.
22-23; Robert N. Emde, "Individual
Meaning and Increasing Complexity: Contributions of Sigmund
Freud and Rene Spitz to Develop-
mental Psychology," Developmental Psychology 28 (1992),
347-59 (Emde stresses that extensive
research "has shown that gender identity is not an outcome of
the Oedipus complex. Core gender
identity is established earlier, usually in the second and third

years of life" [p. 352]); and especially the
important and tenaciously empirical work by Margaret S.
Mahler, in Mahler et al., The Psychological
Birth of the Human Infant: Symbiosis and Individuation (New
York, 1975). As an example of the far
harsher judgments passed by nonpsychoanalytic critics of
Freud, see H. J. Eysenck, Decline and Fall
of the Freudian Empire (Harmondsworth, Eng., 1985), p. 35.
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conditions.47 Finally, recent studies of the mind in sleep have
shown that dreams
have a very different cause from Freud's wish fulfillment, that
their meaning is for
the most part quite clear, and that their bizarreness is an effect,
not of various
"censoring" mechanisms protecting consciousness from a
horrifying truth, but of
the physiology of the brain during sleep.48 As Malcolm
MacMillan has said, in
concluding his exhaustive survey of the fate of Freudian
theories when subjected
to the empirical standards that Freud himself claimed to have
applied, "Psycho-
analysis as a theory of personality has little to recommend it....
Do processes
like condensation and the summation of stimuli occur? Is there

such a mechanism
as repression? Is there a transformation of the primary process
into the secondary?
Is there an Oedipus complex out of which a super-ego forms
and from which the
ego is provided with defused energy? Is the development of
adult sexuality, char-
acter traits, and object-choice as Freud described them? Is
female sexuality as
Freud pictured it? From these points of view, psycho-analysis
is not so much a
bad theory, but a theory in search of some facts."49
Perhaps even more important to literary critics than this
evidentiary absence,
however, is the characteristic mode of argument by which
psychoanalysis pro-
ceeds. Psychoanalytic theory has always been able to absorb
into its system and
to explain in its own terms whatever counterevidence may be
presented. Freud
himself famously jettisoned his theory that neurotic patients
had been seduced in
infancy and replaced it with the less visible, and infinitely
resourceful, notion of
unconscious fantasy-a revision that succeeded in removing
seduction from the
real world (where it could be tested by evidence) and in
relocating it within the
patient him or herself (where it could be discerned only
through psychoanalytic
reconstructions of otherwise forgotten mental events). Freud
had initially told
his collaborator and friend Wilhelm Fliess that the seduction
theory was "the key

that unlocks everything, the etiological formula."5 But even at
this stage it is
unclear whether Freud was actually hearing such stories or
already reconstructing
them by applying his theory to the narratives his patients were
reciting.51 When
47 See Elizabeth Loftus, Memory: Surprising New Insights into
How We Remember and Why We
Forget (Reading, Mass., 1980); Alan Baddeley, Human
Memory: Theory and Practice (Boston, 1990);
Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham, The Myth of
Repressed Memory: False Memories and Al-
legations of Sexual Abuse (New York, 1994); and Crews et al.,
Memory Wars.
48 For recent work on dreaming, see Anthony Shafton, Dream
Reader: Contemporary Approaches
to the Understanding of Dreams (Albany, N.Y., 1995); Inge
Strauch and Barbara Meier, In Search of
Dreams: Results of Experimental Dream Research (Albany,
N.Y., 1996); Michel Jouvet, The Paradox
of Sleep: The Story of Dreaming, trans. Laurence Garey
(Cambridge, Mass., 1999); Arthur W. Epstein,
Dreaming and Other Involuntary Mentation: An Essay in
Neuropsychiatry (Madison, Conn., 1995);
and J. Allan Hobson, The Dreaming Brain (New York, 1988). A
quick overview of this work will
reveal the dubious value of applying Freud's model of dreaming
either to real dreams or-as is some-
times still done-to works of fiction.
49 Macmillan, Freud Evaluated, p. 548.
50 Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, ed. and trans., The Complete
Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm

Fliess, 1887-1904 (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), pp. 45-46.
51 See Crews et al., Memory Wars, pp. 57-58, 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,
1995), pp. 195-213.
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he then decided that his claims of wholesale sexual abuse were
implausible, he
relocated them within the unconscious where they were
available only to the psy-
chotherapist. As he said, "We must not be led astray by [the
patient's] initial
denials. If we keep firmly to what we have inferred, we shall in
the end conquer
every resistance by emphasizing the unshakeable nature of our
convictions....
Since minor deviations from a normal vita sexualis are much
too common for us
to attach any value to their discovery, we shall only allow a
serious and long
continued abnormality in the sexual life of a neurotic patient to

carry weight as
an explanation."52
Hence Freud insisted that corroborative evidence from the
patient's life was not
merely unnecessary but an actual impediment: "It may seem
tempting to take the
easy course of filling up the gaps in a patient's memory by
making inquiries from
the older members of his family; but I cannot advise too
strongly against such a
technique.... One invariably regrets having made oneself
dependent upon such
information; at the same time confidence in the analysis is
shaken and a court of
appeal is set up over it."53 Freud did not abandon his
hypothesis that children
were sexually excited and seduced by their parents and then
threatened with-or
endured-castration. On the contrary, he avoided the court of
appeal of real-life
evidence by reworking the theory to accommodate it in a form
resistant to em-
pirical testing.
This process of calibrating the theory to ignore or absorb
recalcitrant evidence
rather than rethinking its central premises-perhaps the most
characteristic qual-
ity of psychoanalytic thought-gives an impression of immense
explanatory
power while concealing empirical emptiness. Two further
examples should make
this important methodological point clear. Freud argued, as we
have seen, that
"in every case of neurosis there is a sexual aetiology" and that

"anxiety is always
libido which has been deflected from its [normal] employment.
54 But what about
war neuroses, which certainly seem to have nothing to do with
sexuality? Freud's
answer is that the desire for survival is itself libidinal because
it is a form of
"narcissism, which brings the libidinal cathexis of the ego into
line with the ca-
thexes of objects and emphasizes the libidinal character of the
instinct of self-
preservation. "5 In any case, as he says in Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, "me-
chanical agitation [i.e., the concussion caused by exploding
shells] must be
recognized as one of the sources of sexual excitation."s6 By
thus expanding the
52 "Sexuality in the Aetiology of the Neuroses" (1898), SE
3:269. And Freud continues: "Moreover,
the idea that one might, by one's insistence, cause a patient
who is psychically normal to accuse himself
falsely of sexual misdemeanours-such an idea may safely be
disregarded as an imaginary danger."
Quite apart from the astonishing blindness to the power of
suggestion that the analyst's "unshakeable"
conviction could have on a patient that this comment reveals,
one need only substitute "critic" and
"text" for "analyst" and "patient" to see how vulnerable
psychoanalytic criticism is to the danger of
finding sexuality in a text that it already knows must be there.
53 "An Infantile Neurosis," SE 17:14 n; see Cioffi, "Freud and
the Idea of a Pseudo-Science," p. 480
(italics added).

54 "Sexuality in the Aetiology of the Neuroses," SE 3:268. The
brackets are in the original.
55 "Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety" (1926), SE 20:129.
56 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), SE 18:33. In a
footnote Freud compares explosive concus-
sion to swinging and railway travel, a startling trivialization of
the experiences of millions of men
during the Great War.
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notion of libido to include virtually all feelings, Freud was able
to maintain his
hypothesis that, regardless of the occasion for the appearance
of neurosis, its eti-
ology is always a displacement of libidinal energy. Hence
Freud looks forward
confidently to the time when "the libido theory could celebrate
its triumph all
along the line from the simplest 'actual' neurosis to the most
severe alienation of
the personality."57
The second example concerns Freud's familiar assertion that all
dreams are
disguised wish fulfillments. When Freud is presented with a

dream that seems not
to meet his criterion, he simply proclaims that the patient had
the dream in order
to fulfill her wish to thwart Freud's own theory of wish
fulfillment. In a typical
masterstroke of rhetorical subtlety, he then extended this lesson
to his larger au-
dience: "Indeed, it is to be expected that the same thing will
happen to some of
the readers of the present book: they will be quite ready to have
one of their wishes
frustrated in a dream if only their wish that I may be wrong can
be fulfilled."58
Given this preemptive strike, there is no recourse, as Karl
Kraus lamented: "They
have caught me!"59
We have here reached the central issue of interpretation, the
issue that above
all connects Freudian psychoanalysis to literary criticism. It is
clear that Freud's
method of dream interpretation-like his interpretive method as
a whole-is pre-
emptive. The theory posits the meaning of dreams, feelings,
and behaviors, and
the task of the analyst is to read them so that they yield their
preordained signif-
icance. Much has been written on the familiar mix of
arbitrariness and dogmatism
that characterizes psychoanalytic interpretation. Sebastiano
Timpanaro, for ex-
ample, has devoted three long and brilliant chapters to one of
Freud's interpre-
tations in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. The famous
misquotation of a
Virgilian line made by the young man in the train is,

Timpanaro shows, determined
not by unconscious anxieties about his mistress's late menstrual
period but by the
peculiarly difficult syntax employed by Virgil, a difficulty that
caused medieval
scribes to make the same mistake. There is, Timpanaro
modestly says, "nothing
brilliant" about his demonstration, "nor is it even particularly
intelligent . . ; but
it is the simplest and most 'economical' explanation possible."
As for Freud's
interpretation, "beneath the brilliance of the intellectual
fireworks, few procedures
can be reckoned so antiscientific," for it depends upon a
"captious and sophistical
method, resistant to any verification, quick to force
interpretations [and] to secure
pre-ordained proofs."60
57 Introductory Lectures, SE 16:430.
58 Interpretation of Dreams, SE 4:158.
59 See above, n. 14. For a subtle reading of The Interpretation
of Dreams that examines its rhetorical
power, see Alexander Welsh, Freud's Wishful Dream Book
(Princeton, N.J., 1994). Welsh sees the
subject of the book as being not the psyche but Freud's own
ambition.
60 Timpanaro, The Freudian Slip, pp. 29-61, 41,42-43, and 14
(see n. 13 above). In his two-volume
account of psychoanalytic theory, The Non-Authentic Nature of
Freud's Observations, Uppsala Studies
in Education 47-48 (Uppsala, 1993), Max Scharnberg describes
the Freudian interpretive procedure
as follows:

1. Start with a preconceived interpretation.
2. Pick up a few details here and there on the criterion that they
can be used or misused to support
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Chaucer's Pardoner on the Couch 653
In support of its empirical pretensions, psychoanalysis
systematically confuses
meanings with causes. As the British philosopher Frank Cioffi
remarks, "We did
not interpret dreams, symptoms, errors, etc., because it was
discovered that they
were meaningful, but we insisted that they were meaningful in
order that we might
interpret them."61 It may well be that the interpretation will
tell us something
important about the interpreter, or the patient, or the method of
interpretation;
but it can tell us nothing about the cause of the dream or
symptom. This confusion
of etiology with interpretation, or of reason with cause, is at
the very heart of the
psychoanalytic procedure, and it led Wittgenstein to describe
psychoanalysis as
"speculation-something prior even to the formation of an
hypothesis." Witt-
genstein argued that the power of the Freudian system was not

the correctness of
its account of the mind but the fact that Freud provided "the
sort of interpretation
that is wanted," interpretations that have "the attraction which
mythological ex-
planations have, explanations which say that this is all a
repetition of something
that has happened before."62 One sympathizes with Dora when,
after Freud has
interpreted a jewel case that appeared in one of her dreams as
the female genitalia,
she says, "I knew you would say that."63
Freud's famous case histories have been subjected to careful
investigation by
later researchers.64 The characteristic mode of argumentation
they display has led
Cioffi to characterize psychoanalysis not as a protoscience, a
theory still awaiting
its evidentiary basis, but as a pseudoscience that "involves the
habitual and wilful
the interpretation.
3. Connect them with the interpretation by means of the
principle of similarity.
4. Ignore all data which cannot be used as pseudo-support of
any interpretation.
5. If data which contradict the interpretation have inadvertently
been obtained, suppress them and
conceal them from the reader. (2:17)
The best precedent for Freud's hermeneutic is the exegetical
method of the Middle Ages. In both cases
the exegete knows beforehand what the text means-the double
law of charity, the Oedipus complex-
and her task is to explain how the text can mean what she

knows it must mean. This analogy between
the preemptive hermeneutic of medieval exegesis and
psychoanalytic procedures has been pointed out
by Cioffi, "Freud and the Idea of a Pseudo-Science," p. 498,
and by Spence, Rhetorical Voice of
Psychoanalysis (who argues at length that "psychoanalysis is as
much a medieval as a modern science"
[p. 47]).
61 "Freud and the Idea of a Pseudo-Science," p. 498.
62 Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations, pp. 43-44, 47.
63 "A Case of Hysteria" (1905), SE 7:69 (my italics). In a
footnote to this comment Freud easily
trumps Dora: "A very common way of putting aside a piece of
knowledge that emerges from the
repressed."
64 See, for a sample of these investigations, Charles
Bernheimer and Claire Kahane, eds., In Dora's
Case: Freud-Hysteria-Feminism (New York, 1985); Cioffi,
"Freud and the Idea of a Pseudo-Science,"
pp. 471-99 (on Dora); 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; Esterson, Seductive Mirage,
chaps. 3-5; Stanley Fish, "Withholding the Missing Portion:
Power, Meaning, and Persuasion in
Freud's 'The Wolf-Man,'" Times Literary Supplement, August
29, 1986; John Kerr, A Most Dangerous
Method: The Story of ung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein (New
York, 1993); Karin Obholzer, The Wolf-
Man: Conversations with Freud's Patient-Sixty Years Later,
trans. Michael Shaw (New York, 1982);
Frank J. Sulloway, "Reassessing Freud's Case Histories: The
Social Construction of Psychoanalysis,"

Isis 82 (1991), 245-75; and Joseph Wolpe and Stanley
Rachman, "Psychoanalytic 'Evidence': A Cri-
tique Based on Freud's Case of Little Hans," Journal of
Nervous and Mental Disease 131 (1960),
135-48.
2019 02:22:27 UTC
employment of methodologically defective procedures (in a
sense of wilful which
encompasses refined self-deception).... [Hence] there are a host
of peculiarities
of psychoanalytic theory and practice which are apparently
gratuitous and unre-
lated, but which can be understood when once they are seen as
manifestations of
the same impulse: the need to avoid refutation."65 For
example, if a child has an
overbearing superego, Freud argued at one point that this is the
direct effect of a
strict father; but at another point the same phenomenon was
explained as a re-
action against a too lenient father. As Cioffi says, Freud is able
"to render any
outcome whatever an intelligible and apparently natural result
of whatever cir-
cumstances preceded it."66
Since this point is central to the literary use of psychoanalytic
interpretive pro-

cedures, it is worth quoting in full a discussion of
psychoanalytic testing by the
research analyst Sibylle Escalona:
Suppose one wished to investigate the psycho-analytic idea
that, at about the ages of
three and four, little boys characteristically experience hostile
and aggressive feelings
towards their parents and more specifically their fathers, and
that these hostile feelings
are based on the wish to possess the mother and replace the
father in the family con-
stellation. Suppose also that you create an experimental
situation which would activate
the child's feeling towards his parents. For instance, the father
might exert his authority
by sending the child off to his own room when the child wants
to remain with the
parents. If, to substantiate the core of the oedipal hypothesis,
the child were required to
display frank anger against his father, or frank possessiveness
towards his mother, things
would be reasonably simple. However, no one would seriously
believe that oedipal con-
flicts are at work only when the child obligingly acts out both
his wish and his anger at
the obstacle of wish-fulfillment. Instead, we assume that the
child tends to defend himself
against becoming aware of-or openly reflecting-aggression
because it engenders anxi-
ety. Thus, if the child gives daddy a good-night hug and insists
that he, rather than
mummy, tuck him in, this behaviour may also confirm our
original hypothesis. His desire
to have the father put him to bed rather than the mother could
be the result of a fearful

state, i.e. as long as the father is with him the little boy can be
sure the father is not
doing anything to harm him. On the other hand, or also
simultaneously, it may be an
act of aggression towards the father in that it separates him
from the mother for the
time being. Or yet again, it may be because the little boy fears
that if the mother puts
him to bed her seductive powers will prove too much for him;
he will then express his
possessive love for the mother and try to take his father's place,
and the omniscient
father will punish him for it. The example could be spun out
indefinitely, and it is safe
to say that there is nothing our little experimental subject could
possibly do, from with-
drawal, to sudden intense interest in phantasy play, to asking
for a cake, that cannot be
regarded in the light of the assumption that he is reacting to an
oedipal conflict situation.
This being so, it is self-evident that nothing the little boy can
do will confirm the original
hypothesis, since the hypothesis would still be applicable if he
had done the opposite
65 Cioffi, "Freud and the Idea of a Pseudo-Science," pp. 472-
73.
66 Ibid., p. 485. As Cioffi shows in another essay, what makes
a theory pseudoscientific rather than
nonscientific is that its statements are subject to falsifiability
but are presented and maintained in a
context in which testing is rendered impossible. A
pseudoscience will seek to prove itself by citing
positive instances while making it impossible to distinguish
between positive and negative ("Psycho-

analysis, Pseudo-Science and Testability," in Gregory Currie
and Alan Musgrave, eds., Popper and the
Human Sciences, Nijhoff International Philosophy Series 19
[Dordrecht, 1995], pp. 13-44, at p. 17.
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instead.... Psycho-analytic theory is greatly in need of
validation, yet it is the kind of
theory incapable of validation.67
Finally, it must be stressed that the variants of psychoanalytic
theory that have
developed over the years, and especially that associated with
Jacques Lacan, are
not only not free from the flaws of method and conceptual
vagueness that are
fatal to Freudianism but actually invoke them as a badge of
honor. Lacan shows
little interest in empirical validation in preference to
unconstrained theorizing. His
foundational account of prelinguistic identity formation by
means of the "mirror-
stage" relies, as one of his defenders acknowledges, on a "very
limited fund of
observation data," data that genuinely empirical studies have
subsequently shown
to be false.68 Indeed, Lacanianism's popularity in academic

circles derives not from
its truth-value, which remains not just undemonstrated but
indemonstrable, but
from its fit with other modes of "anti-humanist"-indeed
irrationalist-thought
that are taken to be progressive and even liberatory.69
For a long time Freud had a reputation for what Ernest Jones
called "flawless
integrity" and Steven Marcus a "profoundly moral . . .
intellectual commitment
and adherence to the idea of science."70 These reverential
hopes must now also be
abandoned. So, too, must Freud's continual claims to have gone
where no man
dared go before: we now know that many of the central
Freudian concepts-
including the unconscious and the centrality of sexuality to the
mental life-were
common currency in late-nineteenth-century medical circles.71
Freud's suppression
of evidence in the case histories, his self-glorification
(including the tale of his
famous self-analysis, which in all likelihood never took place),
his misbehavior as
67 Sibylle Escalona, "Problems in Psycho-Analytic Research,"
International Journal of Psycho-anal-
ysis 33 (1952), 11-21; cited by Cioffi, "Psychoanalysis,
Pseudo-Science and Testability," pp. 20-21;
emphasis added. See also Morris N. Eagle, "The
Epistemological Status of Recent Developments in
Psychoanalytic Theory," in R. S. Cohen and L. Laudan, eds.,
Physics, Philosophy, and Psychoanalysis:
Essays in Honor of Adolf Griinbaum, Boston Studies in the
Philosophy of Science 76 (Boston, 1983),

pp. 31-55.
68 Bowie, Lacan, p. 22. As Bowie says, Lacan "starves his
hypothesis of the clinical data that could
test its organizing power, and produces neither map nor
message" (p. 25). For empirical evidence
about how infants actually respond to mirrors, see Margaret S.
Mahler and John B. McDevitt,
"Thoughts on the Emergence of the Sense of Self, with
Particular Emphasis on the Body Self," Journal
of the American Psychoanalytic Association 30 (1982), 827-48,
and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn and Michael
Lewis, "Mirror-Image Stimulation and Self Recognition in
Infancy," a paper available at http://
askeric.org/Eric/. I am indebted for these references to Norman
Holland, "The Trouble(s) with Lacan"
(n. 32 above). As Holland says, "There is no evidence for
Lacan's notion of a mirror stage. Indeed
what evidence we have runs rather the other way.... Perhaps
Lacan knew no better in 1936, but why
do present-day Lacanians go on quoting this mish-mash of
conjecture and false assertions?"
69 See Ferry and Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties, pp.
3-67, 185-227.
70 Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 3 vols.
(New York, 1953-57), 1:327, and
Marcus, Freud and the Culture of Psychoanalysis, p. 11. The
most recent and thorough demonstration
of Freud's self-interest in misrepresenting his "data" is
provided by Han Israels, Der Fall Freud: Die
Geburt der Psychoanalyse aus der Liige, trans. (from the
Dutch) Gerd Busse (Hamburg, 1999); an
extensive summary of Israels's indictment is provided by
Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, "How a Fabrication

Differs from a Lie," London Review of Books 22/8 (13 April
2000), 3-7.
71 See especially Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the
Unconscious: The History and Evolution
of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York, 1970); Edward Shorter, A
History of Psychiatry: From the Era of
the Asylum to the Age of Prozac (New York, 1997); and
Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind.
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an analyst, his insistence that his co-workers share a total
commitment to his
dogma or else face exile and obloquy, and even his
championing of cocaine and
his own addiction-all of this would seem mere ad hominem
critique were it not
for the fact that the contemporary institution of psychoanalysis
follows so closely
in its father's footsteps.72 It remains resistant to the empirical
procedures that
characterize other medical practices; it continues to idolize its
founder; it treats
criticism as disloyalty; and it refuses to examine its own
disciplinary history.73
These fundamental problems in a theory that claims to explain
human behavior,

and in a medical institution that claims scientific status, are
apparently either
unknown to, unacknowledged by, or regarded as irrelevant to
the literary critics,
perhaps especially in medieval studies, who have jumped on
what they think is a
bandwagon but is in fact an ambulance or perhaps even a
hearse. The irony is
that psychoanalysis has the reputation of being cutting edge in
literary criticism
even as it has disappeared from those fields for which it was
designed-the un-
derstanding of human behavior and the management of mental
pathologies.74
3. PSYCHOANALYZING THE PARDONER
This section reexamines a well-known medieval text, Chaucer's
Pardoner's Pro-
logue and Tale. In part it constitutes a palinode on my part, a
retraction resembling
Chaucer's own selective rejection of some of his works. I wish
to show the allure
of psychoanalytic interpretation, an allure to which I myself
once succumbed, but
also its limits, specifically the way its seeming persuasiveness
can foreclose access
to relevant medieval materials and contexts. In the General
Prologue to the Can-
72 For the dubious existence of the self-analysis, see Spence,
Rhetorical Voice, chap. 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 con-
nection 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, 1983); Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the
Mind, pp. 327-29; Crews, Skeptical En-
gagements, pp. 48-52; and Clark Glymour, "The Theory of
Your Dreams," in Cohen and Laudan,
eds., Physics, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, pp. 57-71, at pp.
64-69.
73 As the psychoanalyst Robert Holt says: "American
psychoanalysis has lived for so long within a
snug cocoon of myth that it seems unable to go through the
predictable pains of metamorphosis into
a viable progressive discipline. The protective threads it has
wound around itself include warding off
all criticism as resistance, idolatry of Freud, and faithful
internalization of all his faults as a scientist
and writer" (Freud Reappraised, p. 341). To be sure,
contemporary psychoanalysts are aware of their
credibility problem: the American Psychoanalytic Association
has established a Subcommittee on Stra-
tegic Marketing, hired a public relations consultant and
Washington lobbyists, and is conducting focus
groups in order, according to the chairman of the
subcommittee, "to try and define the messages we
should be giving for public use" (New York Times, December
9, 2000, pp. B7 and B9).
74 For a psychoanalyst's account of this irony, see Alan Stone,
"Where Will Psychoanalysis Survive?"

Harvard Magazine 99/3 (1997), 35-39. Stone, a former
president of the American Psychiatric Asso-
ciation, sees the future of psychoanalysis in "the arts and
humanities" and points out that in the
Harvard course catalogue for 1997 there are forty "classes
whose descriptions mention either Freud
or psychoanalysis.... All of them are in the humanities,
particularly literature; no course is being
given in the psychology department, and next to nothing is
offered in the medical school" (p. 38).
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terbury Tales the narrator explains the Pardoner's odd
appearance with the com-
ment "I trowe he were a geldyng or a mare" (691).75 For the
modern reader, for
whom sexual identity is the crucial determinant of selfhood,
this line immediately
places sex at the center of the picture. Two other aspects of the
tale encourage
interpreters to keep it there. One is the Old Man whom the
three rioters of the
tale meet in their quest to kill death, a figure who describes
himself in eerily Oe-
dipal terms.
Ne Deeth, alias, no wol nat han my lyf.
Thus walke I, lyk a restelees kaityf,
And on the ground, which is my moodres gate,

I knokke with my staf, bothe erly and late,
And seye "Leeve mooder, leet me in!"
(727-31)
Equally tempting are the false relics that the Pardoner carries
"biforn hym in his
lappe" (1.686). After he has finished his tale, he turns to the
Host and asks him
to make an offering and kiss these relics. The Host responds
with an outburst
famous for its scatological violence:
I wolde I hadde thy coillons in myn hond
In stide of relikes or of seintuarie.
Lat kutte hem of, I wol thee helpe hem carie;
They shul be shryned in an hogges toord!
(952-55)
Thus the Oedipal dream of a return to the mother (as expressed
by the Old Man)
is here punished by the paternal threat of castration-a
psychoanalytic schema as
neat as any Freudian could want. Not surprisingly, recent
criticism has read the
Pardoner almost exclusively in such terms.
A number of years ago I developed an interpretation of this text
that was es-
sentially historical-that is, it depended upon late-medieval
religious beliefs-but
also invoked psychoanalytic terms.76 I read the Old Man as a
figure for the Par-
doner's own despair; that condition is typically represented in

medieval writing
as always dying but never dead. As for his Oedipal speech, I
explained it by way
of the literary history of the Oedipus legend, which in the
Middle Ages became
linked with the theological condition of despair via the figure
of Judas. In due
course I shall briefly rehearse the main points of that
interpretation, but I want
now to acknowledge that I did not then sufficiently control my
own use of psy-
choanalytic terminology, largely because psychoanalysis
provided a temptingly
prefabricated interpretation that showed how a medieval text
could satisfy mod-
ern (and younger) preoccupations. I now know that there is a
wealth of further
75 All citations from Chaucer are to The Riverside Chaucer,
3rd ed., gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (Bos-
ton, 1987). All further citations will be included in the text by
line number; I have on occasion altered
the punctuation.
76 Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison, Wis., 1991),
pp. 367-421; the essentials of this
reading were first presented in "Chaucerian Confession:
Penitential Literature and the Pardoner,"
Medievalia et humanistica 7 (1976), 153-73, and, with the
added psychoanalytic twist, in a paper at
the Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo in 1985.
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medieval material that the familiar psychoanalytic paradigm
hid from my view,
material that can help us to understand both the Pardoner and
the Old Man with
much greater historical specificity.
The reading of the tale that has now achieved almost classic
status is the thor-
oughly psychoanalytic interpretation offered by Carolyn
Dinshaw in Chaucer's
Sexual Poetics.77 According to Dinshaw the Pardoner enacts
"the modern psycho-
analytic version of the myth of loss and wished-for
reconciliation"; his being is
"essentially defective, lacking, fragmented": "the lacking
Pardoner demonstrates
the pain that must attend the subject's development. .. when it
is seen to depend
on a necessary absence-the necessary loss of plenitude initially
associated with
the mother's body and a definition of the woman as lack." This
lack is expressed
in the Pardoner's use of relics (relics are, according to
Dinshaw, historically not
usually associated with pardoners and therefore should be read
symbolically);78
his relics are fetish objects that substitute for his missing
manhood: "As free-
floating body-parts, they are both reifications of his own
fragmentariness and

substitutes for his own masculine lack."79 But "the Pardoner's
relics cannot really
produce that desired integrity, and he knows it.... They both
represent lack and
substitute for wholeness; they signify absence even as they
suggest presence."80
Although Dinshaw sounds like Lacan, and explicitly invokes
Melanie Klein,
this reading depends ultimately on Freud's account of
fetishism. For Freud, the
fetish is a sexually arousing object that substitutes for the
mother's missing penis-
it is created, in short, by the castration anxiety that both
establishes and charac-
terizes subjectivity. The fetish is a "disavowal" of a reality that
the fetishist ac-
knowledges in another part of his ego: that penises-including
his mother's and,
by implication, his own-can be missing.81 The Lacanian turn to
Dinshaw's ar-
gument is to include in this economy of castration language
itself, arguing that
77 Chaucer's Sexual Poetics (Madison, Wis., 1989). Dinshaw's
chapter has been often reprinted and
cited as providing an authoritative account of the tale: e.g.,
Derek Pearsall, ed., Chaucer to Spenser:
Critical Reader (Malden, Mass., 1999), pp. 65-106, and Bruce
R. Smith, "Premodern Sexualities,"
PMLA 115 (2000), 318-29, at p. 324.
78 In this (mistaken) assumption, Dinshaw is relying upon
Alfred L. Kellogg and Louis A. Hasel-
mayer, "Chaucer's Satire of the Pardoner," in Alfred L.
Kellogg, Chaucer, Langland, Arthur: Essays

in Middle English Literature (New Brunswick, N.J., 1972), pp.
212-44, at p. 233 n. 51. For pardoners
and relics, see Siegfried Wenzel, "Chaucer's Pardoner and His
Relics," Studies in the Age of Chaucer
11 (1989), 37-41 and n. 152. Unfortunately, Dinshaw does not
use Kellogg's excellent "An Augus-
tinian Interpretation of Chaucer's Pardoner," Speculum 26
(1951), 465-81, reprinted in Chaucer,
Langland, Arthur, pp. 245-68, which provides a good account
of the subtle psychologizing available
to medieval Christianity.
79 Dinshaw misses a Freudian opportunity here: in The
Interpretation of Dreams Freud reads one
of his own dreams as showing that he thought that his children
wished to turn his sexual organs into
relics; see Eysenck, Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire,
p. 146.
80 Dinshaw, Chaucer's Sexual Poetics, pp. 161-64, 167-68.
81 See "Fetishism" (1927), SE 21:152-57, and An Outline of
Psycho-Analysis (1940), SE 23:202-
3. Freud argues that the particular object chosen as a fetish
depends upon whatever the child "saw at
the moment at which he saw the female genitals, or it is
something that can suitably serve as a symbolic
substitute for the penis" (SE 23:203). Given his vantage point
from the ground up, the boy thus usually
becomes a foot or shoe fetishist, although occasionally he uses
hair, since his horror at the sight of the
mother's missing penis fixates his gaze on her pubic hair.
658

2019 02:22:27 UTC
the Pardoner's sexual absence signifies linguistic absence.82
"Defined by absence,"
"lack," and "incompleteness," the Pardoner reveals "the nature
of language it-
self," that it too is castrated and lacks full significance. Hence
Chaucer explores
through him "a hermeneutics of the partial, or, for short,
eunuch hermeneutics."83
Dinshaw thus takes as a given the Pardoner's eunuchry, reading
it as both literal
and symbolic.84 But what would a reader in fourteenth-century
England have
assumed about this figure, whom the narrator introduces as
either a gelding or a
mare? Did such terms imply literal or symbolic effeminacy?
And if symbolic, sym-
bolic within what system of signification?
Let us start with the issue of gelding. In the very early Middle
Ages castration
is prescribed as a punishment for various crimes, usually sexual
and occasionally
including sodomy, as in Justinian's law code; it reappears in the
same context in
the later Middle Ages in Italy, although the usual punishment
prescribed for sod-
omy was burning.85 But in later medieval England castration
as a punishment for
any crime is very rare, if not in fact entirely absent. Froissart

reports the castration
of Edward II's reputed lover Hugh Despenser, but this is no
more historically
verifiable than the claim that Edward was himself killed by
having a hot poker
inserted in his anus. In the cultural imagination there clearly
was a link between
sodomy and castration. In the Roman de la Rose Genius wants
all sodomites
castrated, and the eccentric English work known as the Mirror
of Justices says
that at the present time (i.e., 1285-90) the punishment for rape
was hanging, but
82 This argument was first made, in relation to Chaucer's
source for the relevant passage in the
Roman de la Rose, by R. Howard Bloch, Etymologies and
Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of
the French Middle Ages (Chicago, 1983), pp. 128-58.
83 Dinshaw, Chaucer's Sexual Poetics, pp. 158-59.
84 In a later essay, however, she has argued that the Pardoner
must be taken, by ourselves and his
fellow travelers, as queer, a concept whose existence in the
Middle Ages remains to be demonstrated:
"Chaucer's Queer Touches/A Queer Touches Chaucer,"
Exemplaria 7 (1995), 75-92. Queer readings
of the Pardoner-prefigured by Donald R. Howard in The Idea of
the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley,
Calif., 1976), pp. 339-80, and further encouraged by Monica E.
McAlpine, "The Pardoner's Ho-
mosexuality and How It Matters," PMLA 95 (1980), 8-22-have
now become common: see Glenn
Burger, "Kissing the Pardoner," PMLA 107 (1992), 1143-56;
Steven E Kruger, "Claiming the Par-

doner: Toward a Gay Reading of Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale,"
Exemplaria 6 (1994), 115-39; Allen J.
Frantzen, "The Pardoner's Tale, the Pervert, and the Price of
Order in Chaucer's World," in Britton
J. Harwood and Gillian R. Overing, eds., Class and Gender in
Early English Literature: Intersections
(Bloomington, Ind., 1994), pp. 131-47; and Robert Stuart
Sturges, Chaucer's Pardoner and Gender
Theory: Bodies of Discourse (New York, 2000). All of these
readings assume that Chaucer's account
is designed to direct the reader's attention to the Pardoner's
homosexuality. On the other hand, the
proposal that a contemporary audience would have seen the
Pardoner's feminization as an effect of
his excessive sexual dealings with women-i.e., of his too active
heterosexuality-is presented with
strong evidentiary support by C. David Benson, "Chaucer's
Pardoner: His Sexuality and Modern
Critics," Mediaevalia 8 (1985 for 1982), 337-49, and Richard F
Green, "The Sexual Normality of
Chaucer's Pardoner," Mediaevalia 8 (1985 for 1982), 351-58.
Unfortunately, the queer readings of
the Pardoner do not confront this evidence.
85 For Justinian's Code, see John Boswell, Christianity, Social
Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay
People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian
Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago,
1980), p. 172; for the Italian legislation in the later Middle
Ages, see James A. Brundage, Law, Sex,
and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago, 1987), pp.
472-74, 533-35; for castration as a
penalty for sodomy, see Michael Goodich, The Unmentionable
Vice: Homosexuality in the Later
Medieval Period (Santa Barbara, Calif., 1979), p. 83.

659
2019 02:22:27 UTC
that prior to the reign of Edward I rape was punished "by
tearing out of eyes and
loss of testicles, because of the appetite which entered through
the eyes and the
heat of fornication which came into the reins of the lechers."86
In the Placita
Corone, a law book written about 1274, a convicted rapist can
be castrated and
blinded, unless his wife speaks out, for "she can claim her
husband's testicles as
her own property."87 But even this quaint ruling seems to
function more in the
realm of fiction than fact: the editor of the Placita points out
that rape was in fact
punished by fine alone, and that both castration and blinding
"had almost cer-
tainly ceased to be inflicted long before 1274-1275."88 There
may have been
private instances of castration for sexual offenses against
women in the thirteenth
century-Matthew Paris reports one, and in 1275 Parliament
passed a statute
defining rape as a capital offense, perhaps to foreclose the
possibility that castra-
tion and/or blinding would be imposed as a punishment-but

there is no evidence
that this punishment was carried out in any judicial or even
semiofficial way in
England after 1300 at the latest.89 Indeed, mutilation as a
whole seems to have
disappeared in England in the thirteenth century, and even the
gruesomely detailed
execution for treason by drawing and quartering did not include
castration.90
As a physical phenomenon, then, the castrate or eunuch woul d
seem to have
been rare in late-medieval England. It may be that Walter
Clyde Curry is right
that Chaucer drew for his portrait of the Pardoner on the
medical physiognomist
86 Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le roman de la
Rose, ed. Daniel Poirion (Paris, 1974),
lines 19626-86, pp. 520-21; William Joseph Whittaker, ed. and
trans., The Mirror of Justices, Pub-
lications of the Selden Society 7 (London, 1895), p. 141. I am
indebted for the information about
castration as a punishment in England in this and the following
sentences to Prof. Richard F Green.
87 J. M. Kaye, ed., Placita Corone, Selden Society,
Supplementary Series, 4 (London, 1966), p. 9.
88 Ibid., p. xvi; see also p. xxxiv.
89 For Matthew Paris, see H. R. Luard, ed., Chronica majora, 7
vols., Rolls Series 57 (London,
1872-83), 5:34. For the 1285 statute, see The Statutes of the
Realm, ed. Alexander Luders et al., 9
vols. in 10 (London, 1810-22), 1:87; see also 1:29 (1275) and
2:27 (1382). In France I have found

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