to fifty-four lines?Even this brief sampling illustrates clearly enough the limitations and liabilities of using Freudian keys to unlock the mysteries of Kubla Khan. In the first place, of course, there is no received consensus (as we have just seen) about precisely what the poem reveals about Coleridge's subconscious mind. Nor is there agreement about the symbolic significance of the major images: is the stately pleasure-dome to be identified as the female breast (maternal or otherwise), or does it represent, as some think, the mons veneris? Similarly, what are we to make of the violent eructation of the fountain forced with ceaseless turmoil from the deep romantic chasm -- the ejaculation of semen, or the throes of parturition? And then there is the hapless Abyssinian maid, who has been variously identified as Coleridge's muse, as his mother, as Mary Evans (an early flame), as Dorothy Wordsworth, and (since Abyssinian damsels are negroid) as the symbol of Coleridge's repressed impulse toward miscegenation". A second and more serious problem with many Freudian readings, as the foregoing examples make clear, is a tendency to ignore basic rules of evidence and to indulge, as a consequence, in strained and unwarranted speculation. In one account, for example, we are asked (without irony) to believe that the last two lines of Kubla Khan "point by indirection to fellatio, cunnilingus and deep oral attachment to the mother". Another analyst, James F. Hoyle, interprets Coleridge's enforced "retirement" to the farmhouse near Porlock as "the neurotic person's 'vegetative retreat' to para-sympathetic preponderance with overstimulation of gastrointestinal functions, resulting in diarrhea" -- and then, as if this were not enough, goes on to conclude that the "costive opium" taken to check the attack of dysentery "probably helped in converting depression to hypomania" and so was instrumental in transforming "the diarrhea of [Coleridge's...
