ABSTRACT
In 1805, writing in his notebook, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the word ‘psycho-analytical’, pre-dating Freud by ninety-one years. Coleridge was wondering at how the classical, pagan gods had survived as living presences in medieval Christian minds. He concluded that the modern reader would need ‘a strong imagination as well as an accurate psycho-analytical understanding’ in order to get a real sense of this; it was an ‘anonymous hidden life’, active ‘in the ordinary unchecked stream of Thought’ of the times like a kind of ‘Contraband’ (Coleridge 1961: para 2670). 1 A ‘psycho-analytical understanding’ would have to proceed, like one of Coleridge’s own wandering but wonderfully sure-footed sentences, tangentially, indirectly (Eng 1984: 463). Interest such as Coleridge’s in medieval and chivalric ‘romances’ was also key to the naming and development of Romanticism: Romanticism and psychoanalysis are bound together from their beginnings.
