ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how a symbolic act of physical self-mutilation in John Donne is seen as being therapeutic spiritually. Wounds and illnesses seem oddly to have a major bearing on the production of writing. Comedy has its own form of therapeutic catharsis: in Donne it produces texts which are a kind of mediating purgatorio. Some theological therapy rather than any historical, material modes of producing social health. The healthier the world seems, the sicker it is; at the moment when it seems purged of disease, Donne finds its greatest need of therapy. Theology turns to be Donne's only mode of escaping the struggle against history. Donne's 'confessional' texts, his self-exposures, are therapeutic only as they involve a further activity of self-wounding; he is purified and his language validated when it becomes the medium which allows an idealized discourse to elaborate, reveal or 'confess' itself in the 'immaculate conceits'. Donne is 'undone' through the poetry and its writing.
