Milton & Freud: Adam Phillips interviews Joe Moshenska

Broadcast 22 March, 2023. Duration: 1 hour 23 minutes

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In 1907, when the published Hugo Heller asked Sigmund Freud to list ‘ten good books’, Freud noted in his reply that he had not been asked ‘for my “favourite books”, among which I would not have forgotten Milton’s Paradise Lost.’ What do we make of Freud’s affinity for this great seventeenth century poem and its author?

Joe Moshenska, Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and author of Making Darkness Light: The Lives and Times of John Milton, and Adam Phillips, psychoanalyst and author of Becoming Freud, will discuss the resonances between these figures from a number of perspectives: the moments in Freud’s writings where Milton’s name appears, and how these speak to Freud’s anglophilia and ambivalent relationship with his own Jewishness; the history of psychoanalytic interpretations of Milton’s personality and his writings; and the way in which the work of both men seems to veer between an aspiration to total certainty and a relentless insistence that no knowing is ever final.