(no subject)

[tree_and_leaf]

Hm. I've just been reading an article about Marian visions, which turned out to be by a Freudian, who advanced the (not very interesting) theory that it was All A Bit Oedipal.

This is reasonably straightforward to apply to male visionaries (so simple, in fact, that it makes me suspicious), but I can't help feeling that the argument that women who have visions of Mary are therefore vicariously identifying with her as someone who got to fulfil an Oedipal fantasy is straining things a bit. The more so as the accounts of Marian visions which I have read which most obviously seem to have an element of wishfulfilment are invariably motherhood fantasies. And, it should be added, often seem to be stimulated by the devotional practice of the convents where they occur - so it's not just a matter of the subconscious, either. Even if one grants the premise that all religious experiences (or paramystical phenomena, as I'm afraid we sometimes call them in the trade) are all a matter of hallucination,† I don't think it helpful to assume that all desires are about sex.

† Which, as a matter of fact, I don't; at least in the mediaeval period, there was an awareness that people did hallucinate, and in many cases the 'vision' seems to have been something different, and I think is more likely to be a sort of internal visualisation process. Actually, the minute someone claimed to have really, physically seen Christ or Mary or whoever, the authorities tended to get extremely worried and start talking about delusions or deceptions. This isn't, of course, to say that it isn't possible to have religiously-tinged halluciations, as it obviously is; equally, I don't think the 'internal visualisation process' theory isn't incompatible with the visions or revalations having some sort of truth-value.

Comments

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

Don't you know that to a certain mind everything is about sex, and denying it just proves you are in denial about sex, and thus yourself obsessed?

Paging Mr Mybug....

[tree_and_leaf]

How silly and no doubt typically female of me to have forgotten.

The really irritating thing about the article was that he obviously hadn't read any of the visions (although, of course, some of them seem to have been on the account of X told the priest she had seen Y, with no further detail): he just assumed that they had to be understood in terms of the Oedipal dynamic.

[oxoniana.livejournal.com]

I'd LOVE to meet up and have a chat with you about this as my Dphil is on visions and dreams in medieval Scotland. I am currently looking at Marian visions in Bower's Scotichronicon (c. 1440s) and they are VERY interesting. Are you about next week? Do email me if you want to meet up (I'm giving up lj and facebook for lent!)

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

I'm giving up lj and facebook for lent

What a good idea. Might try something similar (I'm not a practising Christian and don't observe Lent) but lj eats my days and thwarts my work ethic.

[tree_and_leaf]

Yeah, that would be nice. I'll drop you an email, but really i can do any time apart from Mondays of Wednesday mornings.

[lilliburlero.livejournal.com]

Was it Karen Armstrong who reckoned they were temporal lobe epilepsy? She had it herself, which tends to colour things. And there are all the ergotism maniacs, for whom I have little time. For secular subjects alive between 1540 and 1909 almost everything can be put down to tertiary syphilis, too.

Myself, I would go with the idea that it was a semi-willed process of visualisation, too. I'm interested in the change in the cultural meaning of vision, because it seems to parallel a change in how people thought about memory, and indicate interesting things about the different way medieval people conceived volition as a whole.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

I thought migraine aura also took some credit? Hildegard of Bingen's visions certainly have that 'rush of stars across the visual field' thing going for that hypothesis.

On the tertiary syphilis theory: I wonder if anyone who claims that this counted as a 'creative malady' has ever read a clinical description of the symptoms of general paralysis of the insane? Not a nice disease.

It would be interesting to see cross-cultural work on visions and the extent to which they are at some level scripted by people's cultural expectations (i.e. medieval Christians don't start seeing animal spirit guides, or if they do, they kept v quiet about it).

[tree_and_leaf]

There obviously is a huge culturally defined element. Actually, with a lot of 'visions' recienevd by nuns, they relate directly to the liturgy of the day the vision was recieved on. Of course, there could be various explanations for that.

i'm not sure about Hildegard. She's so very intellectual- more so than many of the later visionaries - that an awful lot of her visions seem to be reflections of what she has been reading and thinking about. But yes, I have heard the migraine theory.

[prelud.livejournal.com]

I think Oliver Sacks wrote that Hildegard`s visions had elements of migraine auras, and yet he didn`t reduce them to migraine only. I liked that he respected the possibility of higher factors playing a role there.


I respect Freud very much, but those single-minded Freudians get on my nerves, esp. when they talk about religion.

[tree_and_leaf]

As so often, it's not the original thinker - though of course subsequent research has shown that Freud was wrong about a lot of things, but that doesn't alter his importance - but the rather less talented of their disciples....

[tree_and_leaf]

I think somesort of higher factor has to play a role (even if you just want to put it down to H's intellectual gifts), as I sometimes have migraine-like symptoms, and still have unaccountably not written anything like Scivas, or taken to composing!

[tree_and_leaf]

I haven't read K.A., but I think that that would only account for a certain subset of the visions: possibly some of the ones where the sufferer is described as lapsing into unconsciousness.

I dunno. So many of these visions seem to have acoherent theological prgramme at the back of them that I'm reluctant to put them down to being *merely* pathological (though a lot of the millinarian tendencies prbably are the result of ergotism...)

[bufo-viridis.livejournal.com]

Frankly, ten years ago it was stressed in our uni that freudian theory is strictly history, excpt for a several notions which separated and drifted into mainstream psychology (defensive mechanisms mainly).
Problem is, it's still heavy in cultural field, which only proves that people do not read anyting which is not in their narrow field. If the article was recent and the author still uses Oedipal complex (which does not exist) as an explanation, I'd sinply advice him to update his reading by at least... thirty years? Closer to forty, rather.

[tree_and_leaf]

It is quite frightening how these discredited ideas hang about in other fields. I knew that there were a lot of problems with classical Freudianism, but I don't know enough about psychology to make reliable judgements on how bogus the article's author's psychology was. Seems it's about on the same level as his knowledge of mediaeval religion!

[bufo-viridis.livejournal.com]

Funny thing with Freudism is that it made much bigger impact in popular culture than it did in psychology proper :)
It's of course okay theory to analyse "freudian" books, say Philip Roth's, but mediaeval religion text are not exactly one of them :)

[tree_and_leaf]

I think some people just like talking about sex :)

It probably also appeared to the épater les bourgeouis spirit of a lot of early-to-mid twentieth century authors and literary critics....

It's of course okay theory to analyse "freudian" books, say Philip Roth's, but mediaeval religion text are not exactly one of them

My sentiments exactly. A copy of the Marienlexikon or similar works on religious typology is much more likely to be your friend than "Totem and Tabu"...