"Always Historicise!"

- Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, 1981

In my writing about coming of age so far, I notice I've been treating this phenomenon as static or eternal. But of course like everything, it also changes. Although perhaps this needs more proper clarification, which I haven't achieved yet, I want to use coming of age both as a psychological reality and as a cultural metaphor: both are inextricably linked in ways I will explain later. But should those two forms be historicised in different ways?

The question of historical, or 'evolving' psychology is worryingly close to the philosophical question about what is 'human nature' and can it be seen as fundamental. Freudian (or any psychological) ideas seem to imply certain levels of unchanging-ness: that everyone is affected by the same types of complexes. But that is perhaps a superficial reading: we can be affected in different, changing ways; complexes can take different, changing forms. I need to confirm that my model of the child/adult shift in thought could be applied to eighteenth-century minds. How much will my argument here be circular, pointing to the ambivalences in the sources to show that the psychology exists, and then using the psychology as an explanation? Is such an approach illegitimate?

Historicising texts and metaphors is much more familiar to me, and historians generally. That said, it sometimes seems that readers - of Quentin Skinner for example - find this concept strangely novel and awesome. Perhaps all Skinner does is lend authority and credibility to techniques literary scholars had long understood, but that historians had shunned, until a grand old Cambridge man could show the way. I'm sure that is selling him very short. Anyway, I have been reading about changes in the literature of child/adult relations in the eighteenth century, which must be taken into account by my work. We are shooting moving targets from a moving train.