Psychoanalysis and Early Modern Culture: Is it Time to Move Beyond Charges of Anachronism?

In the last few decades, cultural and textual studies of early modern sexualities, passions, kinship bonds, etc., have burgeoned, while more or less overlooking the role of the unconscious within these all too human realms of inquiry. No one doubts that something akin to rationality or irrationality actually occurred in early modernity. But the possibility that something like repression might have occurred opens a floodgate of protests: to pose the question of how repression might have operated within early modernity is to invite the immediate response that the unconscious possesses no earlier history prior to Freud’s famous couch in Vienna. Blunt‐force accusations that psychoanalysis is anachronistic when brought to bear on early modern studies have become mantras, often assuming such mesmerizing, hegemonic force that they have all but foreclosed on the benefits of further reflection and debate. This essay speculates on how – and whether – we can work through and moves beyond this all‐too‐predictable, but stubbornly durable charge.