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“Was there such a thing as adolescence in other eras of civilization?” A myriad of problems writhe beneath the apparent simplicity of the question with which David Levisky opens his book, A Monk on the Couch: An Adolescent Trajectory in the Central Middle Ages. The dominant opinion on this matter would entail a negative answer — adolescence is a modern phenomenon and extrapolating it to a remote past is an ingenuous anachronism.
However, things are not so straightforward. A psychiatrist and psychoanalyst with extensive experience with adolescents, the author intended to go beyond the idées reçues and to inquire thoroughly into the relationship between psychic processes and their socio-cultural conditions. His adviser, University of S¼o Paulo mediaevalist Hilario Franco Junior, suggested that he studied Guibert de Nogent's autobiography, a confessio written between 1114 and 1117. The work is well known among Middle Age specialists and had already drawn the attention of other psychoanalysts1 — and rightly so, for it is a genuine gold-mine.
The ‘confession’ genre calls for a plunge into one's inner life dictated by the awareness of human littleness before God. It also requires sincerity and a capacity for introspection — he who confesses speaks about his desires, sins and fears, and uncompromisingly scrutinizes his own and others’ hearts. Guibert embraces this task with surprising sensibility. His sharp-eyed commentaries on many aspects of emotional life offer a wide basis for Dr Levisky's elaborations.
The problems he had to overcome were of no small importance, though. There were, in the first place, some epistemological pitfalls — can psychic processes be deemed similar in different cultures, or not? If the former is true, why are some of them immune to environmental influences, whereas others depend strongly upon them? The specifically psychoanalytic questions came next — how to work with such an old document, how to verify the accuracy of interpretations in the absen