Repossessions: Psychoanalysis and the Phantasms of Early Modern Culture

Repossessions was first published in 1998. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

A double-edged critical forum, this volume brings early modern culture and psychoanalysis into revisionist dialogue with each other. The authors reflect on how psychoanalysis remains

"possessed" by its incorporation of early modern mythologies, visions, credos, and phantasms. Their essays explore the conceptual and ideological foundations of psychoanalysis while articulating fresh insights into the vicissitudes of autobiography, translation, mourning, and eroticism in the transitional period from the waning of feudalism to the emergence of capitalism.

Employing a broad spectrum of the most recent, Continental psychoanalytic approaches, the book covers topics and figures ranging from King James to Leonardo, demonology to cartography, astronomy to cross-dressing, and mythology to biology. Its detailed readings of Boccaccio, Ficino, Fin, Michelangelo, Montaigne, and others dramatically reassess the foundational concepts of cultural history, secularization, autobiography, reason, and government. Through a sustained focus on visual and verbal residues of personal and cultural trauma, the essays generate innovative analyses of the interrelation of writing, graphic space, self, and social identification in early modern texts, paintings, maps, and other artifacts.

Contributors: Elizabeth J. Bellamy, Tom Conley, Mitchell Greenberg, Kathleen Perry Long, Julia Reinhard Lupton, Christopher Pye, Juliana Schiesari.

Timothy Murray is professor of English and director of graduate studies in Film and Video at Cornell University. Alan K. Smith is assistant professor in the Department of Languages and Literature at the University of Utah.