SOURCE: “Culture and Unconscious Fantasy: Observations on Courtly Love,” in The Psychoanalytic Review , Vol. 54, No. 1, Spring, 1967, pp.36-50.

In the following essay, Koenigsberg analyzes Capellanus’s De Amore in psychological terms, attempting to uncover unconscious conflicts and their effects on the practice of courtly love.

1.

It is not uncommon nowadays for the literary critic, as he becomes aware that his role as cultural authority is being usurped by the psychiatrist, to embrace the conceptual language of psychoanalysis in his interpretations of literary and historical documents, attempting as it were to integrate the humanistic and the scientific, and in so doing to achieve a richer, more balanced view of man's nature. The result, more often than not, reflects a partial understanding of unconscious dynamics which serves only to distort the non-analytic critical function.

An earlier article in this Journal, Courtly Love: Neurosis as Institution,¹ is a case in point...