Freud as Milton’s God: Mapping the Patriarchal Cosmos in Psychoanalysis and Paradise Lost

The first section of this essay reviews the debate between Milton’s theological critics, C. S. Lewis and Stanley Fish, and the heirs to the Romantics, A. J. A. Waldock and William Empson, and argues that no answer was found to Fish’s theory of the “fallen reader.” The second section responds to the theological critics by fusing Kenneth Burke’s framework of “logology,” which reveals the Fall to be inevitable from a narrative standpoint, with an analysis, indebted principally to Bernard Paris, of God as a literary character impelled by narcissism and Heaven as a “glory system.” The final section takes up the parallels between Freud and Milton’s God, and between the cosmos of Paradise Lost and the history and theory of psychoanalysis in its classical form.