Abstract


Yun A-reum:  A Psychoanalytic Approach to the Mystical Experience: Fantasy and Separation in the Book of Margery Kempe   Medieval and Early Modern English Studies Volume 22 No. 2 (2014)   107 ~ 130 

This paper examines the subversiveness of medieval female mystic’s mystical experience inscribed in The Book of Margery Kempe, focused on Margery’s earlier mystical experiences in the light of Lacan’s psychoanalysis theory: Separation, and also observes the complex relationship between orthodox religious ideology and mysticism.
Based on Lacanian Separation, this study reads how Margery became a mystic and the early phase of her mystical life from the viewpoint of her desire,which was not satisfied in the sensible world. In her early mystical life, Margery subordinated to religious ideology and misunderstood that the mystical experience and the absolute divine belonged to the Church. Margery, who was a divided subject, faced her lack through the rejection of confession. The mystical experiences in her early mystic life can be read as her relationship with Christ as an object of desire, which Lacan terms ‘Fantasy.’ During her earlier experiences as a mystic, Margery tried to be approved herself by the discourse of religious ideology. However, as she continued to experience Christ, excluding the established religious spheres, she separated her mystical experiences and her object of desire from the symbolic order, and recognized the lack of the Other (religious ideology). Thus she wished to satisfy her desire by the union with divinity outside the symbolic order. In other words, she realized that the divine is absent from religious circles and acknowledged her own the spiritual authority. This process is well explained through the process of Lacanian Separation in which the divided subject in the symbolic realizes the lack of the Other through the Fantasy relationship.

Key words: Margery Kempe, Jacques Lacan, psychological analysis, medieval female mystic, feminine mystical experience, fantasy, separation, medieval religious ideology