Conclusion: the emergence of Tasso’s psychobiography
The conclusion traces how the psychoanalytical approach utilised in late twentieth-century Freudian interpretations of Tasso’s life and work, by Margaret Ferguson and Giampiero Giamperi for example, had been pre-empted in English biographical accounts of the poet from the second half of the nineteenth century. J. A. Symonds and Leigh Hunt both focus on the same autobiographical poem, the unfinished Canzone al Metauro, as these later psycho-biographical readings to try to account for Tasso’s troubled relationships with his absent mother and particularly his father Bernardo. The conclusion argues that the absence of a clearly defined vocabulary for psychoanalytical discourse pre-Freud does not diminish the acuity of these earlier biographical observations on the poet.