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C. S. Lewis has noted that in Paradise Lost Milton's representation of sexuality is based on St. Augustine's observations in The City of God.1 I have demonstrated elsewhere how in his treatment of Original Sin Milton goes far beyond those observations and that, while adopting Augustinian theories about sex, he represents the Adam-Eve relationship in such a way that it can also be profitably explicated in terms of the Freudian system.2 In this paper, I shall attempt to show the complementary relation between an exegesis of Milton's use of Augustinian theories and to a lesser extent of classical mythology, on the one hand, and on the other, a psychoanalytic exegesis of unconscious content, the one content being transformed into the other.
In Paradise Lost, the correlation between the poet's unconscious and the affective, relational significance which the poem has with respect to the reader is complicated by the fact that we already have to deal with an affective writer-reader correlation in our psychobiographical assessment of Milton, for we will have to confront the following questions: how was the reader Milton affected by what, in his Study in the Psychology of Artistic Imagination, Anton Ehrenzweig calls the “poemagogic power” of the Genesis material3—and, furthermore, how was Milton affected by his reading of St. Augustine's exegesis of Genesis? In other words, my study will not only deal with Milton's own ‘psychoanalysis’ of Adam and Eve as he consciously tried to express it through the text, but will also attempt a psychoanalysis of Milton himself, i.e., an exegesis of his unconscious as it is transformed in the text and affects the reader.
St. Augustine had already mollified one of man's deepest fears and drives, sex, and transformed it into conscious