Die Bekämpfung der Jugendmasturbation im 18. Jahrhundert. Ursachen—Verlauf—Nachwirkungen

Coleridge named his own son who constituted the panoply from whose ideas Coleridge mounted his own dream theory almost a century before Freud's Interpretation of dreams (1900). A desideratum is sometimes lodged against books like this on lines that they are not explicit about the moment of interface between creative act and physiological process. In this instance, the dream act and the medical components on which dreams depend. Traditional literary critics, uninformed about the transdisciplinary status of the organic life sciences, are especially prone to this artificial rift between a presumed bodiless psychology and mindless physiology; partly so because they cannot conceive that sublime "poetic imagination" would stoop to anatomical innards (dare one say bowels?) of mindbody dualism. Yet even poets, writers, and composers have proclaimed the last word on the matter, confirming that Dr Ford has nothing to fret about. Rabelais, a doctorwriter of the finest type, yearned to know about the bellies of Sophocles and Pindar. Swift pondered what Rabelais ate and dreamed. Freud, in a famous passage in Civilization and its discontents, rhapsodized on Rabelais' digestion as the key to his fecund mind. And so forth down through Western civilization. Ford is helpful in putting the pieces back together again.