Reading Poe, Reading Freud (Clive Bloom, 1988)

READING POE READING FREUD
Also by Clive Bloom

NINETEENTH-CENTURY SUSPENSE: FROM POE TO CONAN
DOYLE (editor)
THE 'OCCULT EXPERIENCE AND THE NEW CRITICISM
Reading Poe
Reading Freud
The Romantic Imagination in Crisis
Clive Bloom
Lecturer in [nglis/Z alld Coordinator of American Studies,
Middlesex Polytechnic
M
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© Clive Bloom 1988
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Bloom, Clive
Reading Poe reading Freud:
the romantic imagination in crisis.
1. Freud, Sigmund 2. Psychoanalysis
3. Poe, Edgar Allan-Criticism and
interpretation
1. Title
150.19'52 BF173.F85
ISBN 978-1-349-19302-8 ISBN 978-1-349-19300-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-19300-4
For Joseph, Esther, Leon and Frances
Contents
Preface ix
1 An 'Occult' Relationship: Edgar Allan Poe, Psychoanalysis
and Literary Criticism 1
2 The Magus: Freud and Narrative Technique 11
3 Science and the Daemonic Game of Analysis 18
4 LiterarySpeculations: Hypothesis and the Absent Object
of Analysis 44
5 The Wizardry of Language: Freud's Eternal City 62
6 Revelation, Primal Truth and the Problem of Self-Presence 84
7 The Encyclopaedic Mind: Synthesis and Architypes 97
Notes 124
Index 136
vii
Preface
This book has grown out of a lifelong interest in the work of Edgar
Allan Poe and a more recent passion for Freud. The book's nature is
idiosyncratic, for this is neither a work of history, nor of psychology
nor of art. Instead, my analysis may be seen as an attempt to
understand the origins of a moment occurring within the process of
cultural thought through which appears a 'mechanism' apparently
directing that thought - which is, of itself, beyond anyone of the
disciplines mentioned. My ideas rest, if anywhere, in a type of
theology.
The pathological condition of late Romantic crisis that is the
centre of the relationship I describe is nearer to special issues
concerned with the tracing of meaning and an obsession (within
Romantic art and reading) with the wellsprings of creativity:
something compulsive, daemonic and hidden.
Because of the nature of the present book it can be taken as a more
complete and specialized application of some of the ideas which I
considered in The "Occult" Experience and the New Criticism.
Ironically, the work just mentioned bears less traces of post-
structuralism, being written after the present volume had been
completed during the heady days of deconstruction! Even so this
work is not ultimately a rewriting of post-structuralist dogma; its
core is the nature of the Romantic Imagination.
* * *
I should like to thank Maud Ellmann of Southampton University to

whom this work owes a debt of encouragement and Lesley, my wife
for her unceasing patience under the trials of my corrections.
ix
This is an ordered world, a world that, despite its horror, gives us faith.
And lest it be objected that the faith is groundless, because the police do
not always get their man, it must be remembered that the story's . ..
meaning is that the man will always get himself, an insight . .. into the
underside of psychology. In horror fiction such as Poe's, precisely
because it is fantastic, we find that the escape leads us to the truth of the
human heart . .. the fantastic is then naturalized.
Eric S. Rabkin
The Fantastic in Literature
1
The ~Occult' Relationship
between Edgar Allan Poe,
Psychoanalysis and
Literary Criticism
And the lynx which dwelleth forever in the tomb, came out
therefrom, and lay down at the feet of the Demon, and looked at
him steadily in the face. Edgar Allan Poe
Literary analysis and psychoanalytic interpretation have a long

association. From the earliest beginnings of psychoanalysis Freud
applied his technique to the elucidation of works of literature. His
analyses are filled with allusions from great authors and, moreover,
his case-studies, when they tackle the interpretation of his various
patient's dreams, approach a certain practice of reading.
While there are copious writings by practitioners of applied
psychoanalysis, very often these still tend to follow Freud's own
interest in finding the author behind the work. Interesting as such a
biography-through-text approach can be, it tends to apply rules of
textual and psychological elucidation that it rarely questions,
missing the complex transferential relationship between the
analysed work and the analytic discourse (explanatory body of
theory) wielded by the reader.
Hence, in Kaplan and Kloss's The Unspoken Motive, interest in the
author's 'hidden' biography merely shifts to an elucidation of the
'biography' and motives of the various fictional characters they
discuss. 1 In a very recent psychoanalytic study of 'The Murders in
the Rue Morgue', J. A. Leo Lemay concentrates on the theme of
homosexuality through the motif of doubling. By finding this
pattern of doubling, Lemay argues that each set of doubles is
attempting to reunite within itself and ultimately with each other
set. Lemay argues, moreover, that this series of reunited doubles
1
2 Reading Poe Reading Freud
leaves us with only one figure, neither author nor character, who yet
embodies the scheme of the story: schizophrenia induced by
repressed homosexuality? Hence, although Lemay initially
appears to cleverly 'sexualize' the text, he ends by reducing it to the
study of a single character who, while not named, is finally
reducible to biological and psychological factors in the author's life.
The work of Kaplan, Kloss and Lemay represent modern
'traditional' psychoanalytic approaches to textuality following, as
they do, the pattern of early Freudian interest in this area.
As a consequence of this the analyst's relationship to the text has
largely been ignored by such critics. The complexity of Freud's
theories of transference and overdetermination, which so radically
add to the problem of literary analysis using psychoanalytic
methods have (after a lead given by Freud) too often ended in a
simple reductionism by such authors. 3 More radical psychoanalysts
have, it is true, looked more carefully at literature yet their
conclusions are all too often determined by the former method they
appear to disown.
Furthermore, insights into literary texts by such careful readers as
Jacques Lacan have themselves been determined less by a desire to
elucidate literary practice than to consider psychoanalytic
procedures. 4 Of course, the consequences of such an approach to
texts may have importance in any theory drawing upon the text's
relationship with the reader. Andre Green has demonstrated that
the mechanisms of transference and counter-transference, to which
Lacan applies himself in his reading of Poe, leave a text totally open
and available to analysis yet somehow closed and opaque to the
analyst's attempts at elucidation. 5 The text opens to an 'explanatory'
reading in which its meaning is fixed, only to enwrap the analyst in
its own fictional devices, thus making the analysis merely a
repetition of its structure (a paraphrase) which repeats rather than
explains.
Even though modern psychoanalysts are willing, in theory at
least, to accept the 'fictional' and 'mythic' devices which Freud
used, and which seem so often to parallel the neuroses that give rise
to their invocation, in practice psychoanalysis as a discourse has too
often suffered from becoming a static imposed body of knowledge:
a discourse of analytic method. Because of this, it has been left to
literary analysts and not psychoanalysts to measure the link
between Freud's writings and literature. Nevertheless, while
certain fictional devi{Oes and methods have been found in Freud's
An 'Occult' Relationship 3
work, no careful and complete study has been made of them. 6
* * *
I chose Poe and Freud because of the 'unwritten' and curious

relationship that their texts have with one another.
In this, I intend to highlight the long relationship psychoanalysis
has had with Edgar Allan Poe's life and work. Moreover, by so
doing, I shall argue that Edgar Allan Poe's work both confronts and
then redirects psychoanalytic preoccupations with literature.
Indeed, I chose Edgar Allan Poe because, unlike Kafka and
Dostoevsky, both of whom have been subjects for psychoanalytic
inquiry, Poe's relationship is both longer and more ambiguous.
This relationship is so marked within psychoanalytic literature that
Poe takes on an exemplary position. He takes on a role and gains a
status that other authors do not. The exact fascination with Poe is
not, I would argue, due to his curious pathology or that of his tales.
It rests, principally, in the mirrored concepts psychoanalysis is
forced to 'recognize' in Poe's texts, which, in themselves, force
psychoanalysis to retrace its own analytic path by continually
repeating its encounter with those texts. David W. Butler has shown
that the interesting historical genesis of psychoanalysis belongs to a
period when medicine and art were moving rapidly apart and that
art was becoming in 'psychological' medical practice a suitable
subject for treatment. 'The moment of romantic triumph', writes
Butler, 'in which the individual imagination succeeded in
idealizing the real, was in medical terms the moment at which a
person's disorder turned to complete delusion.'7 Hence, Poe's work
is linked to the antecedents of psychoanalysis and, at the same time,
represents a permanent 'doubt' lurking at the centre of applied
psychoanalysis. In finding Poe's neuroses psychoanalysis
encounters its own. 8
Consequently, writers such as Marie Bonaparte have highlighted
the curious resemblance of Poe's theories in 'Eureka' to those of
Freud's 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle'. It is argued by her, as by
others, that these resemblances are purely artificial, yet she
validates Freud's concepts by, among other texts, analysing
'Eureka', as if Poe was somehow dimly aware of the very Freudian
concept of the 'life' and 'death' drives (see my chapter on Bonaparte
and Poe in The "Occult" Experience and the New Criticism).
To focus upon Poe's relationship with Freud after a number of
studies have already done so may seem injudicious. However, I

believe the application of certain concepts and the expectation of
certain results in these studies have rendered them curiously static
and redundant. What I hope to show is that, while psychoanalytic
concepts and methods can be 'applied' to Poe's texts, Poe's texts
themselves embody certain concepts that question and then change
those in applied psychoanalysis and the newer critical practices
based upon Freudian ideas.
Considered as narratives of analysis, (narratives that express
themselves in the form of 'games'), both Freud and Poe's texts
traverse a landscape neither of science nor fiction; a world
belonging neither to the psyche nor the text. Poe and Freud propose
opposite functions for their discourses in which Freud uses the
discourse of fiction to find truth and Poe exploits the discourse of
truth to create fiction. However, considered as types of narrative the
two discourses are curiously able to intermesh - it is quite possible
to use a Poe tale as an analytic text which itself can be 'applied' if this
narrative 'equivalency' is accepted as a conditioning factor in the
production of both sets of texts. In this way Poe's tales become not
just a peculiar parody of psychoanalysis but a mirror image of
psychoanalysis where reversal and reflection condition the
response of the discourse of analysiS. Indeed, turning the analytic
situation on its head and analysing the appropriating discourse of
psychoanalysis by the analysed texts is suggestive of Poe himself,
for, 'what then', asks Poe, 'would become of it - this context - if
transferred? - if translated? Would it not rather be ... traduced ...
or . . . turned topsy-turvy?,q Here, Poe consciously expresses an
understanding of the problem of analysis: appropriated, the
analysed texts suffer both from translation and being
misrepresented ('traduced'), the analytic discourse turning the text
upside down to shake from it its meaning. However, Poe invites us
here to do the same to the analysing discoure translating it back into
the original analysed tale and seeing if it still fits: where do the gaps
now appear, where the shifts of emphasis, where the 'forced'
structuring?
Previous studies of Poe or his work, both literary and
psychoanalytic have almost without exception, used an invisible
appropriating discourse which makes no attempt to reveal its
methods of appropriation. Even those critical studies which
modestly claimed only to be purely statistical still tended to subject
Poe's texts to considerable modification without questioning the
implications of this reconstituting of Poe's work in the light of his

thematic preoccupations. One study of Poe's colour symbolism by
Wilson O. Clough fails to recognize the difference between the
concepts of colour as emblematic and colour as symbolic, an
important factor in Poe's 'surface' meaning and disinterest in deep
symbolism. 10 Other studies have blatantly relegated Poe's tales to
the outpourings of a morbid pathology which, revealed through the
stories, seems of more value to the critic than the texts themselves.l1
Moreover, even 'overtly' textual analyses are 'covertly' biographical
(which we have seen in Lemay's approach). In The Power of
Blackness, Harry Levin continually 'precipitates' Poe as author-
subject out of the texts, and, thus, Poe finds his perfect surrogate in
his 'hero' and 'all of Poe's dramatis personae scale down, sooner or
later, to the singular and single-minded person of their creator'Y
Biographies are still being produced with the same arguments over
Poe's addictions and neuroses. 13 If the tales are mentioned it is as an
addition to the main critical study.14 Poe, as a biographical 'myth'
figure has continually suffered from his tales being treated as
hidden autobiographical confessions.
Other literary approaches have done little to show the textual
ability of the author: his concern with conscious artifice. Rather,
source hunters such as D. J. Mossop have examined Poe's supposed
'plagiarism' without questioning the basic problems of imitation
and theft as they work within texts. 15 Those that have argued
against Poe's 'unconscious' art have mainly fallen into a
'wilderness' of intentionalism which totally ignores, by over-
compensation, all non-conscious creative processes. 16 The
argument for the steady growth of the artist has replaced the equally
contentious argument about the slow breakdown of the artist;
whereas the former see 'Eureka' as Poe's masterpiece, the latter sees
it as sure proof of Poe's mental collapse; still others keep the two
views ambiguously side by side. 17
Roland Barthes in a little known, yet essential study of Poe's short
story 'The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar', has clearly shown the
careful and technically adept way in which Poe both produces a
narrative full of effects of realism and yet subverts this realism by
the artificiality of a specifically 'literary' style. 18 John Carlos Rowe
has also, in a specifically psychoanalytic reading, attempted to tease
out the strands of Poe's narrative technique with regard to 'The
Narrative of A. Gordon Pym,.19 Interestingly, and curiously, Rowe
ends his critique with a return to the conclusions of Marie
Bonaparte. Moreover, Rowe occassionally lapses into a reductionist

position, both with regard to the nature of texts, the place of
'meaning' and neo-Freudian explanations.
A recent study by J. R. Hammond intended for the general reader
and, in part, as an introduction for new students unaquainted with
Poe studies, exemplifies the problems encountered in full, or in
part, in other more specialised works. Hammond writes, for
instance, on the equation of Poe and his characters, that 'it is
precisely this failure to distinguish between the author and the
ostensible narrator which has led to so much facile criticism of Poe
in the past and to his dismissal as a hysterical purveyor of horror
stories ... the narrator of 'The Black Cat' is not Poe any more than
the narrator of "The Cask of Amontillado" '.20 Yet, surprisingly,
Hammond later comments that reserved, sensitive, courteous and
kindly Usher is indeed a mirror image of Poe or at least a projection,
a d6ppel-ganger of himself as he imagined himself to be ... what
perversity, for example, led him to ascribe to Roderick Usher not
simply his own traits and enthusiasms ... but even his physical
appearance?'21 Perhaps, more importantly, Hammond (because of
the prescribed outline of the publication) is forced to paraphrase
Poe's tales rather than analyse them. There is also no mention of
'Eureka' although Hammond devotes sections to Poe's various
styles of short tale, his criticism and poems.
Whilst previous psychological studies were undertaken by John
W. Robertson and Joseph Wood Krutch, Marie Bonaparte's book
was (and still is) the first to bring the whole body of Poe's writing
under Freud's investigations. Bonaparte's book therefore, explicitly
offers us one of the most powerful appropriating discourses with
which to explore the intertextual weaving of analysing discourse
and analysed text. Her work is still of major importance and is
discussed briefly in a number of psychoanalytic studies dealing
with literature. 22 While Mario Praz refuted Bonaparte's findings (on
almost entirely erroneous grounds) others have been more
cautious. 23 Edward Wagenacht, while accusing Bonaparte's
interpretation of being 'fantastic', simply creates another myth for
Poe's 'inspired' creativity.24
Marie Bonaparte's book represents the 'crisis' of the psycho-
biographical approach in that its terminology 'questions' its
intention: the revealing of Edgar Allan Poe's psyche through the
blending of literary theory, biography and of course, psycho-
analysis. Bonaparte's application of the Freudian usages is strictly
within the path Freud mapped out. Nevertheless it invites us to

re-explore Freud's use of metaphor in explanations of the
unconscious and its motivations that a direct study of Freud could
not do. Her method equally represents the 'classic' pattern used by
Freud to which she carefully adheres. Thus, paradoxically,
Bonaparte's text as it is applied to Poe both exposes the
psychoanalytic enterprise as an appropriating discourse, shows
how it validates its practice and offers another very different way of
using psychoanalysis in intertextuality that questions the use of
essentially literary artifacts such as quotation, metaphor,
paraphrase, narrative and symbolism. Finally, her book allows us to
see the borderland discourses of Freud and Poe as they delimit the
domains of poetry and science.
Poe and Freud have been brought together once again in the
debate between Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida over 'The
Purloined Letter', a debate well analysed by Barbara Johnson. 25
In this debate the name of Bonaparte has reappeared as these
French commentators have 'used' Poe as an exemplary text to argue
over the validity of the appropriating discourse of psychoanalysis,
the place of 'objective' reading, the expanding 'frame' of textuality
and the problem of an analysis caught within the double bind of
transference. Rosemary Jackson has applied these arguments to the
works of Poe within a general literary analysis of the genre of the
'fantastic'.26 However, Neil Hertz has, perhaps, been one of the
most conspicuous writers in recent years to reopen the debate over
Freud's use of metaphor through which Freud's analogies make
visible the concepts they indicate as absent.27
In this study I have tried to avoid a reading which imposes itself
as an applied axiomatic to Poe's work, and I have also avoided the
reductionist correction to this practice of seeing Poe's work as
guided by a principle to which he adhered throughout authorial life
and which reached its apex in the theorizing of 'Eureka'.21l While
the central issue of Poe's reason has for many commentators
become the essential way of reading Poe, the issue of Poe's 'sanity'
becomes in my work the problem of reading itself.24
My interest in applied psychoanalysis is specifically to refer
Freudianism to intertextuality without which it could not function.
I am interested in moving the emphasis from a motival,
biographical and partially teleological reading which operates as
the product of analysis to the analytic moment itself: the
intermeshing of discourse and text applied and reapplied to each
other; the moment that a reading attempts to codify its meaning.

From an analysis of the autonomous single subject (whether author
or text) I move to one determined by interactions between texts.
After many years of approaches concerned with reconstructing a
biography through reading Poe's texts, psychoanalytic studies
began to concentrate on careful, intimate readings of a selected few
tales. The initial interest of such readings anticipates the
structuralist and post-structuralist entry into Poe studies of Barthes,
Derrida and Lacan. Whereas, more traditional critics have seen
Poe's fantasies in the light of his psychology, as I have pointed out,
more contemporary approaches have considered Poe's work as
concerned with the artifices and procedures of the 'literary': a
writing turned consciously toward itself and contemplating its own
production.
We must, therefore, be aware of at least two areas of Poe studies
which are also connected with psychoanalysis. One seeks to
construct a dynamic model of the psyche through reading Poe's
tales. The other approach defines the model of the very processes
psychoanalysis exploits: the use of fictional devices (of narration,
plot, character and style) that relate it to the fictional elements in the
texts it seeks to explain in terms of its own metapsychology.
Hence, it might be argued that this study adheres to a Lacanian
view of the text's relationship to an analysis in the grip of the
repetition compulsion; the very intertextuality robbing the analytic
voice of priority and endlessly delaying the production of any
interpretation. However, I would argue that Jacques Lacan's model
of analysis becomes suddenly static, an infinite lingering over a
non-mobile model.
To create a possible mobility within the model it is necessary,
first, to retrace Freud's stylistic affinities with literary technique
and to show how these affinities allowed him to generate a series of
non-literary concepts that could then be reapplied to the
elucidation of literary works. At the same time, it is necessary to
show that one reason for psychoanalysis' fascination with Poe is
that Poe conceives of a world which is a mirror image of Freud's
own. This world is one in which the conditions which allowed
Freud to find a discourse of 'fact' allowed Poe to form from those
conditions a certain type of fiction. This reversal of polarities allows
us to see how Freudian concepts can be reapplied to the discourse
from which they took form and yet also how that discourse
requestions that conceptual process.
Evidently, it could be argued that Poe and Freud do not share a

similar historical or cultural background and that, therefore, the
conditions which allow for certain ideas in Freud cannot be the
same for Poe. However, it is precisely in the world of textuality that
such cultural considerations are made more complex. In Marie
Bonaparte's account of Poe's texts, Freud becomes Poe's 'textual'
father: Poe indebted to the unconscious inheritance of Freud's
concepts in his work. It is in this account that 'classic'
psychoanalysis not only totally dominates the texts of analysis, but,
also, finds itself enwrapped within those texts; the model closes
around Poe as the author-persona and then re-opens when Freud is
discovered at the 'centre' of that persona.
This disturbing of the model points toward Lacan's conception of
transference and counter-transference in which a textual
unconscious operates outside the analyst's grasp. Indeed, this
unconsious is both directed by and directs the analysed text and
analytic discourse yet in the repetition compulsion of the analytic
discourse creates a stasis that robs the model of mobility. Analysis
loses its authority in the moment an originating plenitude (an
explanatory meaning) is replaced by circularity (the explanation
becoming a paraphrase) - meaning is emptied out of the structure.
It seems to me that this is peculiarly unsatisfactory and that it is
necessary to allow a place for meaning (however temporary) while
reinscribing that meaning in the circularity between the analytic
discourse and its analysed texts. Moreover, to go beyond Lacan's
concept of a type of trapped circularity we need to concern
ourselves with that which escapes to open out the text to meaning,
whether it is to the narrator of the tale or to the 'letter' that robs him
of authority but nevertheless alerts the analyst to its operations.
Where would such an initiatory moment appear that meaning
might be produced from it? And how would such a meaning be
reinscribed within the system which it both produces and from
which it is produced?
To answer this question I return to Poe and Freud's relationship
to the 'occult'. I consider the 'occult' initially in its form of the
daemonic by which is meant the initial driving force of any
compulsion or automatism; whatever impels that compulsion to act
as it does. At first the daemonic is an unnamed origin monstrously
repressed.
It is this unnamed origin I believe that Poe and Freud both try to
name, continually trying to make it present and visible through a
complex series of figurative tropes, tropes that both embody the

origin yet point to it as 'outside' of themselves. This returns us to
the problem of the relationship between the psyche and textuality
the two of which are now defined by their intermeshing through
the process of analysis. This intermeshing, revolves around the
presence of the analyst who is both captured within, while a
witness to, the text he analyses.
It is through the analyst as he directs yet is directed by the text
that the 'lost' origin both absents itself and nevertheless, through
its figuration, becomes visible. As I will show this creates a model
which is both static (at every stage its meaning is 'produced' and is
open to view) and, yet, fluid (at each stage its meaning is absent, the
analysis being caught in a repetition of the text it 'explains,).3o
2
The Magus
Freud and Narrative Technique
Many critics have recognised the importance of literature in Freud's

work. Not only did Freud obtain many of his concepts from literary
sources, but he more than once pointed out that creative writing
had mapped the path that psychoanalysis would be required to
follow.!
In his short article, 'A Special Type of Object Choice made by
Men', Freud explicitly maps out the interweaving areas of literature
and psychoanalysis, writing that, 'up till now we have left it to the
creative writer to depict for us the "necessary conditions for loving"
which govern people's choice of an object, and the way in which
they bring the demands of their imagination into harmony with
reality'.2 Thus far literature has performed in a representative way
(it 'depicts') the harmonizing of fantasy ('their imagination') and
fact ('reality'), an area in which psychoanalysis will take a dynamic
role. Imaginative literature is able to perform what psychoanalysis
will undertake to analyse, that is, to directly connect with the
'unconscious'. 'The writer can', says Freud, 'indeed draw on certain
qualities which fit him to carry out such a task: above all, on a
sensitivity that enables him to perceive the hidden impulses in the
minds of other people, and the courage to let his own unconscious
speak. ,3 Yet at the point of greatest similarity between literature and
psychoanalysis Freud differentiates them, so that, unlike the
investigative power of psychoanalysis, 'there is one circumstance
which lessens the evidential value' of the creative writer. 4 This is
precisely literature's 'aesthetic' value, one which radically
circumvents 'its capacity to investigate' reality. Freud continues,
'writers are under the necessity to produce intellectual and
aesthetic pleasure, as well as certain emotional effects. For this
reason they cannot reproduce the stuff of reality unchanged, but
must isolate portions of its, remove disturbing associations, tone
down the whole and fill in what is missing'. S Hence, on one level
11
fiction is precisely that form of 'distortion' and 'condensation' to

which psychoanalysis can be applied to separate and analyse the
various portions which directly connect with the life of the
unconscious.
But there is a more disturbing movement. Although they are
'unable to reproduce the stuff of reality unchanged', and are
therefore full of gaps, contradictions and additional material,
literary works, like patients, do have a connection with reality
which can be explored through these moments of addition or
subtraction of the material of reality. In this psychoanalysis fills in
the gaps, repairs the damage of the amnesia of the text.
Initially a text presents itself as 'amnesic' in the same sense as the
neurotic. Precisely this' amnesia' consists in the distancing effects
the text produces between itself and its supposed meaning - a
meaning to which it can be attached and from which it has sprung
yet to which it no longer directly points as to a lost origin. Thus, the
analysed text seems to suffer an infinite nostalgia for its origins
which it finds in the discourse of analysis, as if a text were, like the
disposition of the neurotic, subject to 'nostalgia' a precisely because
it searches for a lost and originating causation.1>
Notwithstanding this absence it is precisely fiction's role to 'fill in
what is missing' between the unconscious and reality, the area
already filled with the reason for fiction's existence: the creation of
the 'literary'. Thus, psychoanalysis in an important respect replaces
what has already been filled in.
Freud continues, however, to differentiate the creative writer
from the scientist (the specifically psychoanalytic scientist) but
with increasing difficulty. 'Moreover they [the creative writers] can
show only slight interest in the origin and development of the
mental states which they portray in their completed form. In
consequence it becomes inevitable that psychoanalysis should
concern itself with the same materials whose treatment by artists
has given enjoyment to mankind for thousands of years, though her
touch must be clumsier and the yield of pleasure less.,7 Science,
'clumsier' and yielding 'less' pleasure is introduced 'coyly' through
an apology for its intrusion, an intrusion, which because it
demands 'renunciation' and requires a 'strictly scientific approach'
will offer a purity beyond that found in literature. 'These
observations', says Freud finally, 'will, it may be hoped, serve to
justify us in extending a strictly scientific treatment to the field of
human love. Science, is after all, the most complete renunciation of
The Magus 13
the pleasure principle of which our mental activity is capable.'8

'Science' which replaces literature, by being 'the most complete
renunciation of the pleasure principle' is defined through the
terminology of psychoanalysis.
Freud's debt to literature was not confined to the reading of
creative authors alone, for to Freud each 'patient' was a text, whose
fictional life was available for interpretation, whose words, syntax
and style were subject to a 'reading' which would reveal hidden and
more profound depths. Moreover, many critics have clearly shown
that Freud uses the techniques of fictional narration in his classic
case-studies. 9 A recent anthology has by its very title Freud As
Literature, indicated that Freud is available at least as much as a
literary figure as scientific. 10 Nevertheless, while the essays in that
volume indicate directions for studies of Freud's 'literary' career, no
full account of Freud as a creative writer has been undertaken.
Moreover, along with that, this second literary Freud has only been
fragmentarily linked to the scientific Freud: the investigator. In the
following pages I hope to explore Freud's employment of a number
of literary modes by which he forged a new investigative style for
scientific inquiry. It is necessary to map out the limit and the extent
of Freud's debt to and use of literature, both as example (and more
especially as technique) in his work before turning to the literary
itself: the tales of Edgar Allan Poe. Only in this way, I suggest, can a
full appreciation of their textual interweaving be accomplished.
In a letter to Lou Andreas-Salome Freud once wrote, 'the unity of
this world seems to me something self-understood, something
unworthy of emphasis. What interests me is the separation and
breaking up into its component parts what would otherwise flow
together into a primaeval pUlp'.l1 Freud's interest in 'analysis
involves an art of interpretation'.12 If Frank Sulloway is correct
when he tells us that Freud is 'obsessed' with being creative what
status does analysis have in Freud's work as an 'act of
interpretation'?13
For Poe this problem is stated somewhat differently. He talks of
the idea of textual production, which itself becomes indicative,
(indeed is the process), of the organization of the world itself. 'A
plot properly understood, is perfect only in as much as we shall find
ourselves unable to detach from it or disarrange any single incident
involved, without destruction to the mass.'14 Hence, Poe dismisses
the idea of analytic interpretation in favour of a 'synthetic'
approach. Yet, he too attempts an analysis of this synthesis in his
cosmological interpretation, 'Eureka'. The comparison of fictional

plot to universal design requires an act of analysis, which leads Poe
to write in the 'Drake-Halleck Review' that we need, 'to look
upwards from any existence ... to its design ... by considering,
with what finite judgement we possess, the intention of the Deity' .15
While Freud is interested in analysis, Poe is concerned with
synthesis. Nevertheless, both are interested in the finding and
understanding of the 'lost' origin of the 'creative act' which
indissolubly welds psyche to text and text to psyche, whether of the
individual or the deity.
Let us explore the possible directions that narrative opened up
for both Freud and Poe. How is analysis 'narrated' and narrative
itself given form through analysis?
In the early case histories Freud tells us that the neurotic
becomes speechless before his symptoms, words fail him, are not
adequate for the purpose of describing the uniqueness of his
illness. Hence, Freud proposes, 'the garrulity of many neurotically
crippled persons may be explained - what makes them talk is the
burden of a secret pressing for disclosure, which in spite of all
temptation they never reveal' .16 Having tried to analyse himself, the
patient decides that his own vocabulary is inadequate and that
another must be found.
Freud explains in the case of 'Frau Emmy Von N' that 'her speech
was from time to time subject to spastic interruptions amounting to
a stammer,.17 After an explanatory introduction by Joseph Breuer
about the case of 'Fraulein Anna O'Breuer writes, 'it first became
noticeable that she was at a loss to find words, and this difficulty
gradually increased. Later she lost her command of grammar and
syntax; she no longer conjugated verbs, and eventually she used
only infinitives, for the most part incorrectly formed from weak past
participles; and she omitted both the definite and indefinite article.
In the process of time she became almost completely deprived of
words' .18 Or again, when Breuer writes, commenting on the end of
the patient's hallucination, 'when the snake vanished, in her terror
she tried to pray. But language failed her,.19
Freud was determined to find a language adequate to the task of
describing and giving voice to those elements of the illness that
needed to be cured. However, in the discussion of the case of
'Fraulein Elisabeth Von R.', Freud voices fear that the reader will
ignore his idle story-telling as unscientific, imaginative and giving
no access to new knowledge. In defending himself Freud states that
The Magus 15
only by this new method of research and analysis can a door

hitherto closed to an area of knowledge be thrown open:
I have not always been a psychotherapist. Like other

neuropathologists, I was trained to employ local diagnoses and
electroprognosis, and it still strikes me myself as strange that the
case histories I write should read like short stories and that,
as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science. I must
console myself with the reflection that the nature of the subject is
evidently responsible for this, rather than any preference of my
own. The fact is that local diagnosis and electrical reactions lead
nowhere in the study of hysteria, whereas a detailed description
of mental processes such as we are accustomed to find in the
works of imaginative writers enables me, with the use of a few
psychological formulas, to obtain at least some kind of insight
into the course of that affection. Case histories of this kind are
intended to be judged like psychiatric ones; they have, however,
one advantage over the latter, namely an intimate connection
between the story of the patient's sufferings and the symptoms
of his illness - a connection for which we still search in vain in the
biographies of other psychoses. 2o
Freud says he uses scientific methods, 'psychological formulas',

even if his appeal is directly from the works of 'imaginative
writers?1 Thus, the static case history involves a mobile narration
of the patients' 'unknown' and, as yet, unknowable biography.
Content dictates the original form of Freud's case histories but the
content is often fiction, the fiction of the text, the dream or the
patient's anecdotes 'which may have been true'.22 Freud takes
whatever fiction the patient is willing to offer him. He points out in
the narrative of 'Emmy Von N.', 'under hypnosis she explained that
her fear of worms came from her having once been given a present
of a pretty pin cushion, but next morning, when she wanted to use
it, a lot of little worms had crept out of it, because it had been filled
with bran which was not quite dry. (A hallucination? Perhaps a
fact)' .23
Narrative becomes the vehicle for a new form of science, a novel
science, in which the patient narrates his or her story through the
analyst.
Narration could not be separated from the content produced by
and producing of the narration itself. A fictional device was, of
necessity, built into Freud's technique. This leads an analyst such

as Philip Rieff to comment that, 'Freud made the standard triangle
of many nineteenth-century French novels, frigid wife, sensual
mistress, husband torn between passion and respect - a paradigm
of sexual ineptitude among the civilised classes.'24 Freud's reply,
that such things were daily occurrences compounded the problem
of separating such fact from fiction.
Freud is primarily interested in the psychology of his characters.
To explore this psychology Freud narrates his character's progress
as a form of narrative that undoes itself. Freud's studies consist,
quite simply, of an eternal movement backward. But this backward
movement is simultaneously productive of the present moment in
the analysis which acts as a scene-within-a-scene (a rehearsal
within the play) to the patient's history. Freud's 'novels' of science
require that we read the characters and events backwards. They are
narratives in reverse, which in the act of reversal revive the very
pastness of the past as an event of dramatic and traumatic
consequence in the present (and by extension the future).
This is brought about in two ways, firstly we get to understand
the patient's history which gives them depth but this is founded on
the 'simple' bedrock of the 'complex' which Freud attempts to bring
to light. Thus, the analysis breaks down into its components until it
reappears at the end of itself with the 'primal scene', the first
principle firmly established at the end of the narrative. The' drama'
of the analyst's couch revolves around a 'missing' first scene, a
scene recovered through the second scene acted out in the analyst's
office. In the order of Freud's stylistic presentation first scenes
always emerge last.
At the end of the case history Freud's technique is one that
presents the analysand as tied to an internal and secret 'other'
personality, a historical personality from the patient's past
experience which is nevertheless active in the present. At the end of
the narrative it is the act of analysis that has been narrated as a
process which moves toward the possibilities of the future by
exploring the past. The act of analysis is stylistically narrated in a
future tense, professing a conclusion to be reached, whereas the act
of analysis as it is processed through the patient moves backward
professing a conclusion to be found. In this we are reminded of the
classic novels of detection, with their primal scene of murder which
has to be (re)constructed during the course of the narrative.
'Reading the case histories' remarks Philip Rieff, 'recorded by
The Magus 17
Breuer and Freud in 'Studies on Hysteria' is therefore to re-enter a

lost world of incredible and often bizarre behaviour which is
preserved for us only through the printed word. More fascinating
still is the engrossing detective-story nature of these case
histories,.25
In their form as detective 'novellas' Freud's case narratives show
us the patient as a 'character', whose (re)construction belongs in the
space between the realms of reality and fiction. The detective novel
piles up clues which at its end it will synthesize in the same way
that Freud (re)constructed the 'clues' left by his patients. 'To track
down a dream', continues Philip RieH 'or any actual event, was
inessential.' As evidence, the recollection of the dream seemed to
Freud relevant as the dream itself, since it was, however distorted,
merely a further distortion. A dream, the further twist of recollection
- these were equally valid documents, forgeries, published by the
motivations lurking in the background. Thus, in the analytic
setting, the event reported is 'assimilated into its narration,.26
By the very act of the 'assimilation of' the event reported ... into
its narration' Philip RieH highlights the conditions for applied
psychoanalytic explorations of literary texts. The synthesis of
reportage and interpretation, because it takes place through the
device of narration, questions the position of the narrator-analyst
both as observer-recorder and as an agent of inquiry trying to
construct a structure for that which he has observed.
3
The Occult
Science, the Occult and the Daemonic
Game of Analysis
The founder of psychoanalysis can also be seen to have searched

for congenial theories in the borderland between medicine and
occultism.
James Webb, The Occult Establishment
In Freudian Vocabulary, 'Zwang' is used to denote a

constraining internal force.
J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis
It is to 'novelty' and its special status as affect that Freud turns in

Chapter Five of 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' which follows from
Freud's discussion of the 'compulsion-to-repeat' in his little
grandchild. He writes, 'in the case of children's play we seemed to
see that children repeat unpleasurable experiences,.1 It is, however,
this 'seems' which disturbs Freud, for with the idea of the
possibility of this hypothesis about children will rest the
subsequent speculations that lead directly to a discussion of the
neurotic's behaviour in analysis and to the fearful 'daemonic'
aspects of adult character. 2
We have already said that in its literary form Freud's case
histories are compounded as detective romances, specifically
romances of detection in the form of a science which is itself novel.
Through such novelty Freud is forced by his own argument to
reconsider a paradox of his own making. If the compulsion to repeat
is so prevalent what status can be given to the purely original or
novel, in as much as it is not part of the compulsion previously
described? Freud's remarks are complex but ultimately
inconclusive.
In this passage Freud attempts a short exploration of the pleasure
18
Science and the Daemonic Game of Analysis 19
of repetition in its cultural forms of artistic production. He begins

quite simply with the play of the child in which he tells us, 'nor can
children have their pleasurable experiences repeated often enough',
a point which common sense tells Freud (and common sense both
backs and is confronted by psychoanalysis) is also true for all
adults. 3 The problem arises because children need their original
experience repeated exactly: 'an identical one'.4 As a connecting
fibre to the adult, Freud adds a short sentence 'this character trait
disappears later on'.5 The status, the dynamics and the process of
this atrophy of the pleasurable sensibilities of the child are not
touched upon.
However, 'for an adult', Freud continues, 'if a joke is heard for a
second time it produces almost no effect, a theatrical production
never creates so great an impression the second time as the first,
indeed, it is hardly possible to persuade an adult who have very
much enjoyed reading a book to re-read it immediately. Novelty is
always the condition of enjoyment'.6 Yet, it is the pleasurable
nature of art to remind us, through it, of the mythic repetitions that
animate the 'novelty' of the text, just as the tragedy of Oedipus, and
the triangle of relationships therein is never 'exhausted' by its
representations. In Freud's 'Jokes and their relationship to the
Unconscious', 'The Uncanny', and 'Creative Writers and Day
Dreaming' we see the retrospective force of the repetition of
pleasurable experiences. 7
As adults live more of their lives within culture, so these sources
of private pleasure are buried and re-emerge as stories of terror (the
'daemonic').
It is Freud's first move to normalize repetition as a primary
literary mode. Yet, he is immediately confronted with the problem
of the relationship of literary repetition and the unique, essential
nature of the individual literary text. This primary form of
repetition (the often repeated stories of childhood) contains the
spark or essential 'mythic' quality to which psychoanalysis will
attach itself.
Now, this is the project of Freud's enterprise but Freud abandons
it inconclusively. We must read back to 'The Uncanny' to find
Freud's attitude to the novel as an act of novelty.
But, here Freud proposes psychoanalysis as an analysis of textual
affects, of intellectual subjectivity. In this he succeeds in showing
the status of novelty in the conscious and the unconscious. For the un-
conscious mind it is the repetition of the familiar which holds sway.
In an effort to reopen the problem of repetition and novelty and by

doing so redesign his model of psychological cause and effect,
Freud turns back to pre-scientific thought. The most marked aspect
of the Freudian psychology is that, although it takes what it needs
from modern science its true course is not plotted through Freud's
borrowings in contemporary science but from fable, philosophy
and popular myth. Freud bypasses the contemporary sciences to
ally himself with pre-scientific thought. By exploring dream
(through its occult presence) and in naming his major text
'Traumdeutung' a reference to the books of dream folk-lore; in
looking at 'Das Unheimlich' or in confronting 'telepathy' in
'Dreams and Telepathy', 'Diana of the Ephesians' and 'A Dream
which bore Testimony'; Freud 'retrieves' areas of psychological
explanation long neglected or abandoned by rational science in
order to return them to the forefront of scientific interest. 8 Freud
writes, in his case-study of 'Dora', of an occult act of dream
revelation which 'exposed' mental processes. He tells us that, 'in the
first place, I wished to supplement my book on the interpretation of
dreams by showing how an act which would otherwise be useless,
can be turned to account for the discovery of the hidden and
repressed parts of mentallife,.9 Concerned about various forms of
transference Freud is nevertheless ambiguous in his relationship
with occult phenomena. lO On telepathy he writes:
You will learn nothing from this paper of mine about the enigma
of telepathy; indeed you will not even gather whether I believe in
the existence of telepathy or not. Have I given you the impression
that I am secretly inclined to support the reality of telepathy in the
occult sense? If so, I should very much regret that it is so difficult
to avoid giving such an impression. In reality, however, I was
anxious to be strictly impartial. I have every reason to be so, for I
have no opinion; I know nothing about itY
Nowhere is this interest in the older forms of 'occultism' better

evoked than in Freud's continual return to 'daemonic' possession
wherein Freud hoped to find the key to the central motivation of a
patient's neurosis and which takes the name of 'zwang' in his
terminology. 12 Freud goes back to daemon ism for his psychological
'instance' or 'moment' and in doing so explains daemonism in
terms of psychology. It is the features of the daemonic which
continually attract Freud and lead toward the problem of the
Science and the Daemanic Game af Analysis 21
individual psyche as revealed to that other presence, the

psychoanalyst. 13
Thus, Freud's novel science is based upon foundations that only
the novelist, joker or dramatist has been left to use as rationalist
science has appropriated and removed other areas from them.
Freud is fascinated in 'pre-scientific' thought precisely because of
its syncretic (fully integrated) nature - analysis as synthesis.
Freud makes his science the analysis of that same area which is
left to the domain of art once other forms of science have conceived
of their own autonomous areas. He uses the story of his grandchild
in a novel form for a scientifically novel exposition, the limits of
which we shall discuss later. Freud's novel repeats (by analysis) the
primary processes (of which Freud is the synthecist and proposer),
embedded in the primary literary texts which shape the child and,
through him, the neurotic.
Freud, himself, pointed out that his first attempts were at
symbolic exegesis, 'at first the analysing physician could do no
more than discover the unconscious material that was concealed
from the patient, put it together, and, at the right moment,
communicate it to him. Psychoanalysis was then first and foremost
an art of interpreting'. 14 At one and the same moment, almost from
the very beginning of Freud's enterprise, we see a double and
disturbing movement. At one moment Freud is to be found
stripping the secondary processes of the text down to its essential
content or 'stoff.15 At that moment, however, Freud creates a
synthetic approach, much more complex, in which the point where
so much later psychoanalytic work stops is reproduced and
reprocessed through Freud's analysis as analytic-synthesis. At one
and the same time Freud's analysis robs and restores multiplicity in
the analysed text and the context into which it is integrated. It is the
centrality in analysis of the (counter) transference that practically
and conceptually generates this complexity.
From the techniques and examples of literature and the literary
Freud conceived of a 'science' that enabled itself of what the other
'established' sciences would willingly abandon. Literature and the
occult were two such areas that science either ignored or had
abandoned; both offered themselves to Freud.
James Webb in his book on occult movements in the twentieth
century and their genesis has shown the ambiguous relationship
Freud had with occult theorists at least one of whom, Fliess, was a
colleague. 16
Through links such as hypnotism, Freud associated for a long

time with those very ideas which late romanticism was to
manipulate through its growing literature of the occult and
mystical. That Poe's tales provide a major literary matrix for the
fantastic, the occult and the mystically 'scientific' concepts of the
1830s and 1840s shows how such concepts as 'metapsychosis',
'mesmerism' and the 'Imp of the Perverse' could so easily translate,
via the 'insane theatricality' of the SalpHriere, into the 'return of the
repressed', Freud's advocacy of hypnotism and the 'scientific'
concept of the 'Id'. While Freud is a secularizer of occult or 'rejected'
knowledge, Poe makes such secularised knowledge part of the
'hidden' or occult in his stories.
* * *
Freud's approach to analysis is tied to his narration of the patient's

biography whereas, as I have indicated, Poe's. approach is
inevitably different. As a writer of fiction Poe's adherance to
narration was strictly tied to the necessity to produce fiction itself
rather than another form of truth-exposing discourse. Analysis and
novelty in Poe's work are therefore accorded different values from
that which they attain in Freud.
Poe does not, except in 'Eureka' and some other occasional pieces
tackle the physical sciences and when he does so it is to re-interpret
them through ancient occult systems of conceptualization such as
cosmology in 'Eureka', or reincarnation in 'The Power of Words'
and 'Mesmeric Revelation' .17 Like Freud, when he re-encountered
the occult power of the 'daemonic' in 'The Uncanny', or the power
of the dream, or the prophetic powers of dream contents, so Poe
goes back to the oldest form of 'science' (cosmology) a science
outside accepted practice, to re-open a path for contemporary
fiction. I8
In his tales Poe is interested in science but only where it can be
fictionalized, narrated, told as a story. In a letter dated 11 April 1846
Poe told a correspondent that 'in the case of Valdemar, I made a
pronounced effort of verisimilutude for the sake of effect'.I9 Hence,
in 'The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar' Poe's style parodies later
psychologists such as Freud when Poe, preparing for his most
impressive 'hoax' writes, 'I now feel that I have reached the point of
this narrative at which every reader will be startled into positive
disbelief. It is my business however simply to proceed', which
returns us to the conclusions to Freud's case-histories?O When

Freud begins to reach the point that narrative must give way to a
conclusive interpretation, fact, somehow uncannily, becomes
stranger than fiction, so fracturing the narrator/reader rapport that
had preceded it. Freud is forced to write, 'it must therefore be left at
this (I can see no other possibility): either the analysis based on the
neurosis in his childhood is all a piece of nonsense from the start to
finish, or everything took place just as I have described it above',
and elsewhere, 'I have now reached the point at which I must
abandon the support of the analysis. I am afraid it will also be the
point at which the reader's belief will abandon me. 12l The point at
which Freud fears the reader will 'abandon' him is the very point at
which the reader picks up a Poe tale. Yet, curiously, both achieve a
relationship to psychological reality and to the production of
meaning through analysis.
This leads D. H. Lawrence to remark on Poe's fiction that, 'he is
absolutely concerned with the disintegration processes of his own
psyche .... This makes him almost more of a scientist than an artist.
... Doomed to seethe down his soul ... and doomed to register the
process ... it is an almost chemical analysis of the soul and
consciousness'.22
Notwithstanding which Roland Barthes has shown that in a tale
such as 'The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar' Poe's underlying
attitude to science is one in which scientific 'fact' offers the writer of
fiction a perfect vehicle for the creation of an 'effect' of reality:
Following Mesmer (in English, 'magnetism' can be called

'mesmerism') and the Marquis Armand de Puysegur, who had
discovered that magnetism could provoke somnambulism,
magnetisers and magnetist societies had multiplied in France
(around 1820); in 1829, it appears that it had been possible, under
hypnosis, to carry out the painless ablation of a tumour; in 1845,
the year of our story, Braid of Manchester codified hypnosis by
provoking nervous fatigue through the contemplation of a
shining object; in 1850, in the Mesmeric Hospital of Calcutta,
painless births were achieved. We know that subsequently
Charcot classified hypnotic states and circumscribed hypnosis
under hysteria (1882), but that since then hysterial has
disappeared from hospitals as a clinical entity (from the moment
it was no longer observed). The year 1845 marks the peak of
scientific illusion: people believed in a psychological reality of
hypnosis (although Poe, pointing out Valdemar's 'nervousness',

may allow the inference of the subject's hysterical
predisposition)?3
Thus, Poe's use of mesmerism exploits a strong contemporary issue

of the 1840s itself almost 'stranger than fiction' in order to take it to
the extreme limit of factuality (the mesmerism of the dead in order
to prolong 'life') so that at its most extremely factual, the scientific
becomes a supreme fiction. At the point of M. Valdemar's going
into his death-trance Poe fuses the nature of the scientific (the
modern and contemporary) with the occult (ancient and
mysterious).
In 'The Thousand-and-second Tale of Scheherezade' Poe's
epigraph reads 'Truth is stranger than fiction' and this leads to the
story of Scheherezade's final demise, a story found in the
'Isit06rnot' a continuation of the Arabian Nights. 24 Here we get, as
mythical creatures, the inventors of modern technology:
Among the magicians, were domesticated several animals of very

singular kinds; for example, there was a huge horse whose bones
were iron and whose blood was boiling water. In place of corn, he
had black stones for his usual food; and yet in spite of so hard a
diet, he was so strong and swift that he would drag a load more
weighty than the grandest temple in the city, and at a rate
surpassing that of the flight of most birds. 25
Appended to this invention of the 'magicians' is a careful factual

footnote on the speed of Great Western Railway locomotives, 'on
the great Western Railway', the footnote reads, 'between London
and Exeter, a speed of 71 miles per hour has been attained. A train
weighing 90 tons was whirled from Paddington to Didcot (53 miles)
in 51 minutes'.26
Beyond Poe's obvious delight in such parody this passage does
reveal Poe's ambivalence towards nineteenth century science. Poe's
most grandiose 'scientific' tales are concerned with cosmologies
that are not dependent upon scientific fact. A 'hybrid' tale, in which
two angelic forms discuss their condition both before and after
death or the destruction of the universe, or the relation of God to
knowledge is Poe's answer to scientific discourse. He wrote a
number of these dialogues: 'The Colloquy of Monos and Una', 'The
Conversation of Eiros and Charmion', 'The Power of Words' and
'Mesmeric Revelation'.27 In 'Mesmeric Revelation' and 'The Facts in

the Case of M. Valdemar' the interlocutor is a 'doctor' or 'hypnotist'.
Harry Levin makes an interesting comment on the 'reversal' that
Poe's work performs in attacking rationalist science:
[Poe's] youthful sonnet 'To Science' voices the stock objection of

the romanticists: that the scientific attitude reduces everything to
the most prosaic reality. Yet, in his prose, it proves to be a source
of virtually poetic inspiration. It is not simply magical ... rather,
by believing in all the claims of all the sciences and pseudo-
sciences, by expecting almost anything from nature, Poe can
almost dispense with the supernatural ... he is a rationalist ...
but the forces of the irrational have their revenge in jeopardizing
the status of reason itself.28
The eclectic nature of Poe's interest in science and the occult makes
of science an 'occult' presence by its very reproduction within
fiction. Rationalism itself jeopardizes reason, science questions its
own pursuit, but more than that, as Levin points out, it can allow
Poe to 'almost dispense with the supernatural'. 'Almost' but not
quite for the supernatural now becomes the medium for a
scientifically analytic pursuit reproduced within the literature of
the fantastic.
In each one of these dialogues it is the psychical or 'occult'
language's (spoken and textual) power of reproduction that is the
main factor. Poe's most 'ambitious' serious attempt at scientific
objectivity, 'Eureka' is itself begun in the style of a 'letter' written by
a friend of a character called 'Pundit'.29 This letter, foregrounds a
literary device (the epistle) which brings forward the value of
fiction in even this speculative and 'non-fictional' work. Thus, Poe's
characters in his scientific tales recall science but do not function
within scientific enquiry.
Poe is, however, interested in the act of analysis itself and it is in
his tales of ratiocination, his detective tales, that we find most of his
important pronouncements. Poe is only interested in analysis
ultimately as a property of narrative. Hence, as Poe explains in 'The
Murders in the Rue Morgue', the act of analysis is foreclosed from
an analysis of its procedures. 'The mental features discoursed of as
the analytical, are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis.
We appreciate them only in their effects'.J° Thus, analysis produces
the 'effects' which will animate Poe's fiction, effects, moreover, not
closed to analysis simply because they are the mental features that
perform the analysis itself even though like Freud's 'psyche' they
are 'little susceptible of analysis'. The 'effects' of analysis are
precisely the narration of the core of the act of analysis: the
substance of analysis. In the first instance then, 'as the strong man
exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as call his
muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity
which disentangles'. 31 And in this mode of disentangling the analyst
'derives pleasure from even the most trivial occupations bringing
his talents into play'.32 Thus, Freud, retaining a keen hold on those
trivial everyday things (jokes, slips of the pen, personal rituals) that
others will consider too insignificant, founds his whole framework
for the dynamics of the psyche. It is exactly these trivial slips that
produce gaps through which the unconscious is 'revealed'. Freud
points out that, 'examples could be found in every analysis to show
that precisely the most trivial elements of a dream are indispensible
to its interpretation and that the work in hand is held up if attention
is not paid to these elements until too late'.33 And again in a
practical example of interpretation, 'in the apparently absurd
dream which treated the difference between 51 and 56 as a
negligible quantity, the number 51 was mentioned several times.
Instead of regarding this as a matter of course, or as something
indifferent, we inferred from it there was a second line of thought
... the dream of Irma's injection contained the phrase "I at once
called in Dr. M.", [and] we assumed that even this detail would not
have found its way into the dream unless it had some particular
origin,.34
The seemingly meaningless phrase 'I at once called in Dr. M'
assumes a significance that others, by implication, would have
ignored, and hence of the' difference between 51 and 56' ... instead
of regarding this as 'a matter of course, or as something indifferent'
Freud is able to make his inference. In this concern with Poe's
'trivial occupation' the analyst displays his fondness' of enigmas, of
conundrums, of hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a
degree of 'acumen' which appears to the ordinary apprehension
preternatural' (in that through this trivia fundamental relationships
and hence meanings are generated).35
In finding suitable answers to the questions the analyst sets
himself 'his results, brought about by the very soul and essence of
method, have, in truth, the whole air of intuition'.36 In the
combining of 'method' and 'intuition', the twin domains of the
scientist and the poet, the 'analyst' creates a new moment, one in
which he endeavours to construct a narrative in which subjective
and objective attitudes, biographical and historical interests, are
combined in a new proportion. 37
The re-combinatory capacity of the analyst not only looks back to
a pre-scientific age before the supposed 'dissassociation of
sensibility' but also forward to the age of specialization in the
human sciences. It is this ability that Poe, playing on the concepts of
'result' 'resolving', 'liquifying' calls 'the faculty of re-solution
[which] is possibly much invigorated by mathematical study, and
especially by that highest branch of it which, unjustly, and merely
on account of its retrograde operations, has been called, as if "par
excellence" analysis. Yet to calculate is not in itself to analyse,.38
Relating analysis to the idea of imagination he was to borrow
from Coleridge Poe tells us, 'it will be found, in fact, that the
ingenious are always fanciful and the truly imaginative never
otherwise than analytic,.39 It is therefore in the faculty of
imagination that analytic reason functions according to Poe.
Analysis then partakes of and participates in the daemonic aspect of
mankind. Analysis is not merely an instrument, it is the faculty by
which man knows himself to be man and thereby, as Poe explains
in 'Eureka', allows man to know himself as part of the Godhead.
Analysis in its divine nature unites man to God by revelation.
Analysis expresses a teleology that inevitably concerns itself with
synthesis (of man with God).
In Poe's elucidation of the analytic faculty it is always analysis as
an endless playfulness that excites its own description. Analysis
allows the analyst to derive, 'pleasure from even the most trivial
occupations bringing his talents into play'. Thus analysis as an
innate faculty of the analyst is a unique possession 'but little
susceptible of analysis itself' which becomes a source of 'the
liveliest enjoyment'. As the innate faculty of man (the analytic
animal) analysis cannot reveal its source, for the moment the analyst
comprehends the conditioning factor of his analytic faculty (his
relationship with the Godhead) he is absorbed into the Godhead
and functions by direct empathy.
It is therefore not surprising that Poe's acts of analysis are
elucidated through the metaphor of the game not only in as much as
analysis is both enjoyment of the play of reason but also in as much
as Poe's 'winners' always 'lose' (are annihilated) once they guess
the secret to be revealed. In The Purloined Letter' Dupin, the arch
analyst, always uses the analogy of the 'game' with which to

illustrate his concept of analysis. 4o Through the metaphor of
'game' Dupin is able to 'solve' the 'crime' in the tale. He contrasts
the 'professional' player (the Prefect of Police) firstly and explicitly
with the child and then implicitly with himself as the gifted
amateur:
'The measures, then', [Dupin] continued, 'were good in their

kind, and well executed; their defect lay in their being
inapplicable to the case, and to the man. A certain set of highly
ingenious resources are, with the Prefect, a sort of Procrustean
bed, to which he forcible adapts his designs. But he perpetually
errs by being too deep or too shallow for the matter in hand; and
many a schoolboy is a better reasoner than he' Y
The Prefect habituated to the use of 'measures', is unable to

combine the mathematical and the intuitive which 'in being' not
only inapplicable to the case, but also to the man, fails to take into
account the psychological aspect of any game and any analysis of
this kind. The simplicity of the 'schoolboy' is then of better value.
Dupin continues:
'I knew one about eight years of age whose success at guessing in
the game of 'even and odd' attracted universal admiration. This
game is simple, and is played with marbles. One player holds in
his hand a number of these toys, and demands of another
whether that number is even or odd. If the guess is right, the
guesser wins one; if wrong, he loses one. The boy to whom I
allude won all the marbles of the school. Of course he had some
principle of guessing; and this lay in mere observation and
admeasurement of the astuteness of his opponents. For example,
an arrant simpleton is his opponent, and holding up his closed
hand, ask, 'Are they even or odd?' Our schoolboy replies, 'odd',
and loses; but upon the second trial he wins, for he then says to
himself, 'the simpleton had the even upon the first trial, and his
amount of cunning is just sufficient to make him have them odd
upon the second; I will therefore guess odd'; - he guesses odd,
and wins. Now, with a simpleton a degree above the first, he
would have reasoned thus: 'This fellow finds that in the first
instance I guessed odd, and, in the second, he will propose to
himself upon the first impulse, a simple variation from even to
odd, as did the first simpleton; but then a second thought will
suggest that this is too simple a variation, and finally he will
decide upon putting it even as before. I will therefore guess
even'; - he guesses even, and wins. Now this mode of reasoning
in the schoolboy, whom his fellows termed 'lucky', - what, in its
last analysis, is it? "It is merely", I said, "an identification of the
reasoner's intellect with that of his opponent".42
Consequently the analyst (Poe's 'reasoner') makes an

identification only in order to differentiate himself more exactly
from his opponent:
Upon inquiring of the boy by what means he effected the

thorough identification in which his success consisted, I [Dupin]
received answer as follows: 'when I wish to find out how wise, or
how stupid, or how good, or how wicked is anyone, or what are
his thoughts at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face,
as accurately as possible in accordance with the expression of his,
and then wait to see what thoughts of sentiments arise in my
mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression' .43
Through its nature the game of marbles splits the 'reasoner' into
he-who-thinks-against-the-opponent and he-who-identifies-
with-the-opponent and it thus invokes, with the placement of the
opponent, three positions. It also involves, by this identification
with the opponent's mentality, a subjection of the 'reasoner' to his
mirror image. Later in the tale, Dupin, through his regaining the
purloined letter and yet 'telling' the Minister (even though this
should have remained a secret) is reinscribed within the circle of
desire both to win and escape the necessity of exposing himself as a
winner.
It is through the mediation of the marbles (or the purloined letter)
that the absolute subject is robbed of his power of victory in this
circular game, which may lead, quite disarmingly, to the possibility
of his losing his marbles. Poe's grand paradox rests upon the notion
that as the analyst disengages from the opponent (or subject of his
analysis) he re-engages himself and puts himself into a relationship
with the opponent from whom he cannot escape. Thus, Poe's
analysts often find that the solution shifts from the subject under
investigation to centre upon themselves and in so doing shifts (for
the reader) to a problem centred on the very textuality in which that

questioning of self and 'other' takes place. It is not to over anticipate
the following chapters, in which these ideas are developed and
their consequences considered, to state that this shifting unites
Oedipal structure (the answer being in ourselves as Oedipal figures
- and yet one to which we never pose a question) with textual
exegesis (at what point does textuality give way to a meaning
outside itself)? Madness, self-destruction, - 'silence', all too often
greet the Poe characters who begin this analysis of soul, psyche and
text. To return to Dupin: we are told that, if a 'thorough
identification' with the 'opponent' is achieved, (as R. D. Laing has
clearly shown with schizophrenics), the possibility of a position for
objective assessment is made all the more impossible, especially if
your opponent is a 'simpleton', which of course the Minister Dis
not. 44 The possibility of winning is contained in the necessity of an
identification so absolute as to rob the victor of his possessions.
Jacques Lacan writing on 'The Purloined Letter' has demonstrated
this circularity of desire, possession and loss with "regard to the
circulation of the stolen 'letter'. Paradoxically this 'letter' gives
absolute power to each one of its holders (they hold the 'secret') yet
simultaneously robs each holder because to expose the letter would
be to dissolve its power. By 'identifications' the character-analyst
finds the very possibility of his being able to interpret put to
hazard.
In 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue', Poe again gives us an
analysis of the analytic faculty as it operates in chess, draughts and
whist. He begins by denying chess its status as the apotheosis of
analysis:
I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of

the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully
tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by all the
elaborate frivolity of chess. In this latter, where the pieces have
different and bizarre motions, with various and variable values,
what is only complex is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is
profound. The attention is here called powerfully into play. If it
flag for an instant, an oversight is committed, resulting in injury
or defeat. The possible moves being not only manifold but
involute, the chances of such oversights are multiplied; and in
nine cases out of ten it is the more concentrative rather than the
more acute player who conquers.45
He contrasts this with draughts 'where the moves are unique and
have but little variation, the probabilities of inadvertence are
diminished, and the mere attention being left comparatively
unemployed, what advantages are obtained by either party are
obtained by superior acumen'.46
In draughts it is 'acumen' (or keen insight) that finds the winning
combination of moves. Poe continues with an example: 'to be less
abstract - Let us suppose a game of draughts where the pieces are
reduced to four kings, and where, of course, no oversight is to be
expected. It is obvious that here the victory can be decided (the
players being at all equal) only by some recherche movement, the
result of some exertion of the intellect'. Where 'no oversight' is to be
expected, that is oversight as mistake, the winning player must form
an 'oversight' or overall view with which to win. In exact equality
the keen analytic player finds the slight difference that gives him
victory through the 'recherche' application of the analytic faculty.
What is it, asks the analyst, that the opponent has done that will
necessitate a certain move in the future? The 'unspoken' history of
the opponent will decide his future in and at the end of the analytic
session. Again, for Poe, this is achieved through the controlled
transferences of 'identification'. 'Deprived of ordinary resources, the
analyst throws himself into the spirit of his opponent, identifies
himself therewith, and not unfrequently sees thus, at a glance, the
sole methods (sometimes indeed absurdly simple ones) by which
he may seduce into error or hurry into miscalculations: 47
Beyond both chess and draughts, whist is the apparently unlikely
apex of the art of the game:
Whist had long been noted for its influence upon what is termed
the calculating power; and men of the highest order of intellect
have been known to take an apparently unaccountable delight in
it, while eschewing chess as frivolous. Beyond doubt there is
nothing of a similar nature so greatly tasking the faculty of
analysis. The best chess-player in Christendom may be little
more than the best player of chess; but proficiency in whist
implies capacity for success in all these more important under
takings where mind struggles with mind. 4H
Whist is the psychological game 'where mind struggles with mind'

and where 'nothing of a similar nature so greatly [tasks) the faculty
of analysis'. It is a game not of simple identification but one in
which all the possible identifications and interpretations must be

taken into account, one in which 'overdetermination' is paramount
and one in which by understanding all these factors the analyst is
brought face to face with thinking processes as yet unperceived in
himself or his opponent. 'I mean that perfection in the game which
includes a comprehension of all the sources whence legitimate
advantage may be derived. These are not only manifold but
multiform, and lie frequently among recesses of thought altogether
inaccessible to the ordinary understanding.,49
This extraordinary perception of the opponent's psychology is
similar to that produced by the Freudian method of understanding-
through-repetition which includes in its technique an
identification wi th the other person's process of questioning. Freud
observes in one patient a certain dissatisfaction with first answers:
He forced himself to understand the precise meaning of every

syllable that was addressed to him as though he might otherwise
be missing some priceless treasure. Accordingly he kept asking:
'What was it you just said?' And after it had been repeated to
him he could not help thinking it had sounded different the first
time, so he remained dissatisfied. 50
The patient like the analyst understands the first answer as a

decoy from which a 'solution' is absent. However, the analyst
understands that between the first and the second answer (first and
second 'move') there appears a suitable gap for interpretation
(through an identification with the patient's technique of
questioning). 'In analysing the dreams of my patients I sometimes
put. this assertion to the following test, which has never failed me. If
the first account given me by a patient of a dream is too hard to
follow I ask him to repeat it. In doing so he rarely uses the same
words.'51
As Freud finds the opening through the patient's 'slips' which
lead him to find a 'correct' 'resolution' of the neurosis so this is how
Poe's whist player finds his own victory through observing the play
of his opponents - not what they do but how they do it:
To observe attentively is to remember distinctly; and so far, the

concentrative player will do very well at whist; while the rules of
Hoyle (themselves based upon the mere mechanism of the game)
are sufficiently and generally comprehensible. Thus to have a
retentive memory, and to proceed by 'the book', are points

commonly regarded as the sum total of good playing. But it is in
matters beyond the limits of mere rule that the skill of the analyst
is evinced. He makes, in silence, a host of observations and
inferences. So, perhaps, do his companions; and the difference in
the extent of the information obtained, lies not so much in the
validity of the inference as in the quality of the observation. The
necessary knowledge is that of what to observe. 52
Moreover, the 'necessary knowledge of what to observe will

include an analysis of the total image the opponent presents to the
analyst; his every little slip is a 'symptom' which can be read,
interpreted and made of use. It is the initial mistake that allows for a
final interpretive decision by the analyst as to the reaction he must
adopt to the analysed. The analytic situation, while seemingly
confined to the action and reaction of the analyst and the analysed,
finds its 're-solution' beyond both by combination in the analysis
of those elements which are apparently external. It is these very
external, almost superficial things that lead the analysis to its
'conclusion'. These super-added externals lie, paradoxically, at the
centre of the analysis and so:
Our player [never] confines himself ... because the game is the
object, [nor] does he reject deductions from things external to the
game. He examines the countenance of his partner, comparing it
carefully with that of each of his opponents. He considers the
mode of assorting the cards in each hand; often counting trump
by trump, and honour by honour, through the glances bestowed
by their holders upon each. He notes every variation of face as the
play progresses, gathering a fund of thought from the differences
in the expression of certainty, of surprise, of triumph, or chagrin.
From the manner of gathering up a trick he judges whether the
person taking it can make another in the suit. He recognises what
is played through feint, by the air with which it is thrown upon
the table. A casual or inadvertent word; the accidental dropping
or turning of a card, with the accompanying anxiety or
carelessness in regard to its concealment; the counting of the
tricks, with the order of their arrangement; embarrassment,
hesitation, eagerness or trepidation - all afford, to his apparently
intuitive perception, indications of the true state of affairs. The
first two or three rounds having been played, he is in full
possession of the contents of each hand, and thenceforward puts

down his cards with as absolute a precision of purpose as if the
rest of the party had turned outward the faces of their own. 53
At the 're-solution' of the game of whist Poe resolves for his

reader the act of the analysis itself- its method and technique. Yet at
the very same time by invoking 'identification', 'concealment' and
'intuition' he questions the deductive powers of the analyst who is
able so confidently to 'put down his cards with an absolute
precision of purpose as if the rest of the party had turned outward
the faces of their own'.
In the chapters which follow on I shall explore the drive for
interpretation that motivates the analyst in his quest for meaning
('the true state of affairs') which is exposed through identification
and transference.
That Poe should give such a large amount of space to a discussion
of games in what ostensibly appear narratives of detection indicates
not only that games were a good metaphoric analogy for analysis
but that the action of games provides the technique of the narrative
itself, much as Freud's narrative of 'fort/da' provides the
interpretation as well. It is this faculty of textual directing, says
Helene Cixous, that 'fascinates Freud: "the freedom of the author,
the privilege accorded fiction in order to evoke and exhibit" the
emotions or the phantoms of the reader, the power to lift or impose
censorship'. 54 Poe, too, equivocates as to the inessential nature of
the place of the game analogy in the narrative which it begins. 'I am
not now writing a treatise', says Poe 'but simply prefacing a
somewhat peculiar narrative by observations very much at
random. ISS As these 'observations' are 'very much' [not] 'at random'
the 'narrative' nature of the play inherent in Poe's tales of detection
is concealed by the text. This applies also to Poe's horror tale
'Berenice', for whose narrator the action of slow self-realization
would seem hardly to partake of the nature of a game and to whom
the 'mental features' that allow such a realization could hardly, at
least initially, be seen as a 'source of the liveliest enjoyment'. Yet the
notion of play still applies even to this grim tale of 'epilepsy', 'a
monomaniac', interment alive and mutilation (the ripping out of
teeth). In 'Berenice' play, the analyst and the act of analysis are
interwoven through textuality itself: through the technique of
narrative.
The narrator begins with a philosophical disquisition upon
misery. Indeed, the first paragraph is a physical description ot

'misery' which itself is analytically described in terms of its
relationship to 'ethics' and 'memory':
Misery is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform.

Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow, its hues are as
various as the hues of that arch, - as distinct too, yet as intimately
blended. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow! How is
it that from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness? - from
the covenant of peace a simile of sorrow? But as, in ethics, evil is a
consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either
the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies
which are have their origin in the ecstasies which might have
been. 56
Almost outside of his own misery the narrator uses a neutral and
objective voice with which to analyse his state of being. He takes
hiimself as his object and as he does so he disengages from a
narrative (his autobiography) in which he is forever doomed.
Once introduced, the narrator continues by describing
autobiographical details through architectural associations. Thus,
the narrator slips into an equivocal voice that invokes a name
('Egaeus') confined neither to the realm of the strictly human nor to
the realm of the merely artificial (architecture). The narrator is
baptised into the architecture from which he takes his being. As an
, architectural' character Egaeus points to the essentially constructed
artifice of his textual existence. Egaeus's family are the house as
Usher is his house. Egaeus's family have an equivalency with the
house that denies analogical metaphor and makes metaphor literal.
Egaeus's being is metaphorical and is literally lived as metaphor
returning the text forcibly to a reminder of its own validity the
deepest content of which joins 'visionaries' to the image of a
'library':
My baptismal name is Egaeus; that of my family I will not

mention. Yet there are no towers in the land more time-honoured
than my gloomy, grey, hereditary halls. Our line has been called a
race of visionaries; and in many striking particulars - in the
character of the family mansion - in the frescoes of the chief
saloon - in the tapestries of the dormitories - in the chiselling of
some buttresses in the armoury -but more especially in the
gallery of antique paintings - in the fashion of the library

chamber - and, lastly, in the very peculiar nature of the library's
contents, there is more than sufficient evidence to warrant the
belief. 57
Thus the narrator's family members are connected through the

architecture ('in the chiselling of the buttresses'), the 'tapestries'
and (most importantly) the 'library' to their destiny as 'visionaries'.
The narrator's tale is confined to being told among the 'very
peculiar nature of the library's contents'. In the library death and
life begin, for, 'the recollections of my earliest years are connected
with that chamber, and with its volumes ... here died my mother.
Herein was I born'. Moreover, the narrator's life is contained in
books for they are literally the substance of his life and hence thrust
into' a palace of imagination' the narrator's life becomes part of 'the
very regions of fairy-land':
In that chamber was I born. Thus awaking from the long night of
what seemed, but was not, nonentity, at once into the very
regions of fairy-land - into a palace of imagination - into the wild
dominions of monastic thought and erudition - it is not singular
that I gazed around me with a startled and ardent eye - that I
loitered away my boyhood in books, and dissipated my youth in
reverie; but it is singular that as years rolled away, and the noon
of manhood found me still in the mansion of my fathers - it is
wonderful what stagnation there fell upon the springs of my life-
wonderful how total an inversion took place in the character of
my commonest thought. The realities of the world affected me as
visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of
dreams became, in tum, - not the material of my every-day
existence - but in very deed that existence utterly and solely in
itself.58
Expelled from the 'real' (a Neo-Platonic pre-existence that 'was not

nonentity') the narrator is thrust into the 'unreal' reality of a life
enclosed in 'visions': external reality turns in upon itself and
becomes internal reverie. For Egaeus life becomes art.
By this technique Poe's text prepares us for the play of
interpretation contained in the act of reading. Prepared in advance
for the sole purpose of explication the text awaits its reader. In
'Berenice' this reader is split between the narrator of the tale and the
reader of the tale (that is, he or she to whom the text is addressed).
Narrator and reader are conflated and at the same time distanced
(do we 'share' the crime?) by the introduction of a passage
describing the action of analysis which applies both to the
narrator's need to understand his destiny and our need to interpret
the tale. The narrator's obsession with the singularity of a unique
'meaning' spills over into the interpretive desire of the reader being
(willingly) prepared for a denouement. We have already seen the
interest the analyst places upon 'trivia'. Poe's narrator tells us:
Yet let me not be misapprehended. - The undue, earnest, and

morbid attention thus excited by objects in their own nature
frivolous, must not be confounded in character with that
ruminating propensity common to all mankind, and more
especially indulged in by persons of arden imagination. It was
not even, as might be at first supposed, an extreme condition, or
exaggeration of such propensity, but primarily and essentially
distinct and different. 59
The text now begins to 'play' with its reader in its equivocation as
to the status of 'imagination'. It is of course the very technique of
Poe's tale that by 'imagination' the reader should (to allow a
momentary tautology) imagine that he is witnessing the reality of a
psychological exploration, rather than the effect of a psychological
disquisition filtered through narrative. The narrator, like the
reader, is 'forced' to deny his imagination by actually allowing it to
function. 'In the one instance, the dreamer, or enthusiast, being
interested by an object usually not frivolous, imperceptibly loses
sight of this object in a wilderness of deductions and suggestions
issuing therefrom, until, at the conclusion of a day-dream often
replete with luxury, he finds the incitamentum or first cause of his
musings entirely vanished and forgotten'.6o
By this stylistic equivocation Poe's text' conceals' the fact that this
paragraph is itself part of the 'day-dream' ('the realities of the world
affected me as visions') and performs the functions of giving the
text its substance ('replete with luxury'). The narrator continues to
distance his analysis (his obsession with trivia) from the life of the
imagination:
In my case the primary object was invariably frivolous, although

assuming, through the medium of my distempered vision, a
refracted and unreal importance. Few deductions, if any, were

made; and those few pertinaciously returning in upon the
original object as a centre. The meditations were never
pleasurable; and at the termination of the reverie, the first cause,
so far from being out of sight, had attained that supernaturally
exaggerated interest which was the prevailing feature of the
disease. In a word, the powers of mind more particularly
exercised were, with me, as I have said before, the attentive, and
are, with the day-dreamer, the speculative. 61
Although 'the meditations' we are told, 'were never pleasurable',

it is the technique through which the meditations are narrated in
the tale that exercises the pleasurable feeling that accompanies the
act of analysis: the reader enjoys the very playfulness of the
luxurious meditation of the text. Again the reader is recalled to the
nature of texts in the tale by the very next paragraph:
My books, at this epoch, if they did not actually serve to irritate

the disorder, partook, it will be perceived, largely, in their
imaginative and inconsequential nature, of the characteristic
qualities of the disorder itself. I well remember, among others,
the treatise of the noble Italian Coelius Secundus Curio, De
Amplitudine Beati Regni Dei; St. Austin's great work, The City of
God; and Tertullian, De Came Christi, in which the paradoxical
sentence, "Mortuus est Dei filius; credible est quia ineptum est:
et sepultus resurrexit; certum est quia impossibile est", occupied
my undivided time, for many weeks of laborious and fruitless
investigation. 62
Books contain, by their 'essence', an enigma, and it is this text's

concern to point that out, and hence a 'simple' sentence confounds
the analyst, having 'occupied [his] undivided time for many weeks
of laborious and fruitless investigation'. The text institutes this
enquiry merely to drop it as an 'obscure' passage 'irritates' the
narrator's malady by his attempts to 'read'. It is part of the
playfulness inherent in the paragraph that these books are
emblematic of the narrator's state and have no intrinsically symbolic
weight. 63 Moreover, this heroic catalogue of books is invoked as yet
another metaphorical mesh with the name Egaeus. Thus, they stand
for Egaeus' state of mind and so actually become his character.
Egaeus makes of himself a concordant or exegitical text in his
Science and the Daemanic Game of Analysis 39
obsessional need to explain the equivocal latin phrase. By so doing

he is again conflated with his surroundings; the books he consumes
actually consume him and become his essence: the essential subject
of his analysis at that moment before he turns to the 'teeth'. They
indicate the need to read the next passage in which the' action' of
the tale will take place and in which the narrator's obsession with
his wife's teeth will begin.
It is in the obsession with teeth that the narrator, and through his
actions, the tale, will find its destiny, for it is the deciphering of the
meaning of the teeth that the narrator feels he will find the answer to
his questions about meaning, which ironically will recall him to a
lost 'reason':
I held them in every light. I turned them in every attitude. I

surveyed their characteristics. I dwelt upon their peculiarities. I
pondered upon their conformation. I mused upon the alteration
in their nature. I shuddered as I assigned to them in imagination
a sensitive and sentient power, and even when unassisted by the
lips, a capability of moral expression. Of Mad'selle Salle it has
been well said, "que tous ses pas etaient des sentiments", and of
Berenice I more seriously believed que toutes ses dents etaient
des idees. Des idees! - ah here was the idiotic thought that
destroyed me! Des idees! - ah therefore it was that I coveted them
so madly. I felt that their possession could alone ever restore me
to peace, in giving me back to reason. 64
Inevitably, it is the teeth that clasp the narrator to his destiny:

they do hold the 'answer' he seeks, but they also become the object
of, and focus for the stylistic progress of the tale: they are the final
image at the story's climax. The teeth form the 'prize' awarded at the
end of the tale of the next section of the story, one that might be
entitled, 'guess what's in the box?'
After the' death' of Berenice there is the third ellipsis of the tale as
if a theatrical curtain had finished each succeeding scene although
the act had not changed in this small psychological murder drama.
This ellipsis introduces the final 'act' in which the game of guessing
begins. Almost inevitably the narrator tells us 'I found myself
sitting in the library'. The narrator is given some clues as to his
status (the reader is already 'half-aware' of the ending), 'I knew', he
says, 'that it was now midnight, and I was well aware that since the
setting of the sun Berenice had been interred'.65 Two 'facts' but no
more, for, 'of that dreary period which intervened I had no positive
- at least no definite comprehension'.
To find the answer to this amnaesic period (the crucial period) the
narrator draws the analogy of the period (and of himself) to a text in
the hope that it will be 'readable', but finds that 'it was a fearful page
in the record of my existence, written all over with dim, and
hideous, and unintelligible recollections'.66 The 'repressed' is
hidden in the text of the narrator's (fictional) existence; textuality
envelops psychological 'text'.
The game of finding the 'repressed' is organized around an initial
question, asked again by the echoing chamber, 'I had done a deed-
what was it? I asked myself the question aloud, and the whispering
echoes of the chamber answered me, "what was it?"!'67
In the gap between the question and its repetition, as Freud tells
us, the repressed makes its slow appearance. The following
paragraph opens the next stage of the guessing game with the
physical presence of the 'evidence'. The solution to the puzzle
around the contents of the box will resolve itself around whether
the narrator will open the box by guessing its contents. A clue
accompanies the box: a quotation of the poet 'Ebn Zaiat', the box
itself being - (an ironical clue to the reader: an indication) - 'the
property of the family physician':
On the table beside me burned a lamp, and near it lay a little box.
It was of no remarkable character, and I had seen it frequently
before, for it was the property of the family physician; but how
came it there, upon my table, and why did I shudder in regarding
it? These things were in no manner to be accounted for, and my
eyes at length dropped to the open pages of a book, and to a
sentence underscored therein. The words were the singular but
simple ones of the poet Ebn Zaiat, 'Dicebant mihi sodales si
sepulchrum amicae visitarem, curas meas aliquantulum fore
levatas'.68
The box however, for the moment, remains closed for the analyst
is unable to put all the pieces of the analytic jigsaw together -
amnesia still prevents him re-collecting all the possible clues. That
is why the text brings in the analyst's assistant, a 'menial' who will
give the analyst enough clues to identify the solution to the first half
of the puzzle:
There came a light tap at the library door, and pale as the tenant of
a tomb, a menial entered upon tiptoe. His looks were wild with
terror, and he spoke to me in a voice tremulous, husky, and very
low. What said he? - some broken sentences I heard. He told of a
wild cry disturbing the silence of the night - of the gathering
together of the household - of a search in the direction of the
sound; - and then his tones grew thrillingly distinct as he
whispered me of a violated grave - of a disfigured body
enshrouded, yet still breathing, still palpitating, still alive. 69
Further clues indicate the direction the solution will take, 'he
pointed to my garments; - they were muddy and clotted with gore. I
spoke not, and he took me gently by the hand; - it was indented
with the impress of human nails. He directed my attention to some
object against the wall; - I looked at it for some minutes; - it was a
spade'?O
Enervated, the 'analyst' at last seizes the box - but - it remains
shut - he drops it - it bursts open: he has found the solution but lost
the game:
With a shriek I bounded to the table, and grasped the box that lay
upon it. But I could not force it open; and in my tremor it slipped
from my hands, and fell heavily, and burst into pieces; and from
it, with a rattling sound, there rolled out some instruments of
dental surgery, intermingled with thirty-two small, white and
ivory-looking substances that were scattered to and from about
the floor. 71
The box, like the 'enigma', bursts open and out fall, as the
solution itself, the teeth, of which the narrator has been continually
reminding himself and his reader throughout the tale while at the
same time suppressing the memory of them for both himself and
his reader.
The teeth as textual artifacts are always 'exposed' to view (even
'unassisted by the lips') forming a solution to the acrostic nature of
the tale which conceals their presence while continually indicating
it.
* * *
In 'Berenice' there are two traumatic moments. The first is before
the story begins and asks what would make the narrator
pathologically prone to this fixation? Obviously we cannot tell as
there is no character before the story. The second moment of
repression, in which the act is recoverable, is the extraction of the
teeth. This second scene is available, the first is not.
Indeed, in 'Berenice' the initial monomania of the narrator is no
more than a rationale of his later obsession with the teeth. The
climax of the story does no more than recall the narrator's
psychological obsession - but not the desire that created that
obsession. The causative factors of the monomania are nowhere
available (neither to reader nor narrator) although the progress and
focus of the monomania are clearly discernable. This is how the
narrator describes the progress of his disease:
In the meantime my own disease - for I have been told that I

should call it by no other appellation - my own disease, then,
grew rapidly upon me, and assumed finally· a monomaniac
character of a novel and extraordinary form - hourly and
momently gaining vigour - and at length obtaining over me the
most incomprehensible ascendency. This monomania, if I must
so term it, consisted in a morbid irritability of those properties of
the mind in metaphysical science termed the attentive. It is more
than probable that I am not understood; but I fear, indeed, that it
is in no manner possible to convey to the mind of the merely
general reader an adequate idea of that nervous intensity of
interest with which, in my case, the powers of meditation (not to
speak technically) busied and buried themselves, in the
contemplation of even the most ordinary objects of the universe.
To muse for long unwearied hours with my attention riveted to

some frivolous device on the margin, or in the typography of a
book; to become absorbed for the better part of a summer's day,
in a quaint shadow failing aslant upon the tapestry, or upon the
door; to lose myself for an entire night in watching the steady
flame of a lamp, or the embers of a fire; to dream away whole days
over the perfume of a flower; to repeat monotonously some
common word, until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition,
ceased to convey any idea whatever to the mind; to lose all sense
of motion or physical existence, by means of absolute bodily
quiescence long and obstinately persevered in; - such were a few
of the most common and least pernicious vagaries induced by a
condition of the mental faculties, not, indeed, altogether

unparalleled, but certainly bidding defiance to anything like
analysis or explanation. 72
The stylistic equivocation at the end of this descriptive diagnosis

relates monomania (as not 'unparalleled' or not unsimilar) to
'analysis or explanation'. Monomania, by its obsession with
analysis, nevertheless thwarts that very analysis because of its
obsessive quality. In this monomania analysis becomes fixation
and paranoia.
From all these examples of 'attentive[ness), there is a massive
transference of affect onto his wife's teeth. The teeth express the
narrator's monomania but the monomania itself is left 'bidding
defiance to anything like analysis or explanation' for monomania
cannot analyse itself even though it is the gross exaggeration of the
analytic faculty.
Thus, it becomes a disease of the analytic faculty itself ('a morbid
irritability'). The narrator becomes 'lost' in the things he
contemplates, his ego-boundaries dissolve in the contemplation of
trivia. Hence, Egaeus becomes a 'ghost' inhabiting the 'frame of a
lamp' or the 'margin ... of a book' or a 'quaint shadow'. Unlike
Descartes Egaeus is unable to reconstruct his mind in the 'embers of
a fire'.
In 'Berenice' three scenes of desire operate; one before the story's
opening which asks why the obsession was operative; the second
which asks why the obsession operated on the teeth, and a third in
which the analytic desire attempts to recover not the first but the
second scene. The applied psychoanalysis of Marie Bonaparte
shows how this first scene is reconstructed by Bonaparte as
contained in Poe's 'paranoia'. Hence, two transferential moments
are available, one in which a transference of affect opens the
narrative to its interpretation, and the other in which the analytic
desire for an initial scene enwraps itself in the second scene.
For the moment it will be necessary to leave the question of the
relationship between the original idea and its symptom until we
consider Freud and Poe's relationship to language. In the next
chapter I wish to examine the relationship between the user of
analytic language and that which he analyses.
4
Occult Speculations
Figuration, Literary Speculation,
Hypothesis and the Absent 'Object'
of Analysis; Poe's 'Eureka' and
Freud's 'Beyond The Pleasure
Principle'
In the following pages I wish to discuss the use and direction of

applied psychoanalysis, one in which its techniques generate an
interpretation but its concepts are re-integrated within the texts
analysed.
Initially, as observer-recorder Freud is already forced into the
role of structuring analyst, using all the metaphorical tropes that he
would tirelessly develop in his career until analogy (the image of
the 'station' in 'Dora', for example) becomes itself the very device
which would generate the terms of psychoanalysis. One of the most
forceful of these analogies compared the act of analysis with
archeology in order to give a structure to the experience observed.
Freud writes in the case of a schizophrenic:
So it was that his mental life impressed one in much the same way
as the religion of Ancient Egypt, which is so unintelligible to us
because it preserves the earlier stages of its development side by
side with the end products, retains the most ancient gods and
their attributes along with the most modern ones, and thus, as it
were, spreads out upon a two-dimensional surface what other
instances of evolution show us in the solid. I
'Ancient Egypt's' religion becomes the analogy for

schizophrenia, a schizophrenia now 'spread out upon a two-
dimensional surface in which the observer is able to view the
'evolution' of the neurosis and the history of Egyptian religion. The
44
Literary Speculations 45
idea of 'retention' which marks the unconscious continues to be

elaborated in metaphors such as this where the observer, the
observed and the metaphoric 'medium' of observation are in
intimate contact. Furthermore, metaphor allowed Freud to give
substance to concepts the nature of which would always leave them
'invisible', or at worst 'absent' from their symptomatic rendering.
Once Freud was aware that to 'cure' a symptom did not remove the
'cause', then the idea of a continually 'absented' presence to the
originating moment became a possibility. The originating cause by
being absent was exactly what interested Freud; the always 'missing'
mechanism. Hence, Freud's project is aimed at filling a gap in
scientific knowledge by finding a gap in our awareness (an
invisible 'spot'). Thus, Freud starts his enquiry in the invisible
world of the psyche and not in the symptomatic world of action. In
what way then is Freud theoretically interested in the relationship
between original idea and symptom?
Samuel Weber has pointed out that, 'if Freud appeals to
observation, then it is to establish the necessity of a certain
theoretical obscurity' and in doing so Freud highlights the apparent
contradiction which we have detailed, that to see is to be blind, yet
by this blindness an opening becomes available for another type of
reading which is nevertheless enclosed within 'obscurity,.2 The
problem centres on how can one 'read' or observe a 'certain
theoretical obscurity?'. To do this we must return to Freud's most
theoretically 'obscure' book.
In 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' Freud attempts to analyse this
problem and, as in the 'fort/da' episode, he does so by creating a
dramatic narrative within which to discuss child and adult
phantasy. For Freud the whole fabric of his argument becomes
fraught with internal tensions as the narrative gains mastery over
the scientific conclusion, the aesthetic over the clinically provable;
'clinical observation', as Freud says, 'led us at that time to the view
that masochism, the component instinct which is complementary
to sadism, must be regarded as sadism that has been turned round
upon the subject's own ego'.3 But it is exactly this 'clinical
observation', this collecting of data, that has put Freud on the
'wrong' track for it has diverted him (as he now realises) from the
discovery of the possibility of 'primary masochism' an idea that
reverses his original thought.
Observation of this kind therefore, becomes at the onset, an
obstacle to research and Freud 'abandons' it in order to speculate on
the 'ultimate' relationship that dominates, not only man but the
cosmos. He writes, 'if therefore, we are not to abandon the
hypothesis of death instincts, we must suppose them to be
associated from the very first with life instincts. But it must be
admitted that in that case we shall be working upon an equation
with two unknown quantities'. 4 'Hypothesis' 'admits' that it works
upon 'an equation with two unknown quantities' yet, by working
with 'quantities', however unknown, an 'equation' can be made,
even though it is an equation in which both sides are absent:
Freud designated as 'unconscious' any mental process the

existence of which we are obliged to assume - because, for
instance, we infer it in some way from its effects - but of which we
are not directly aware. Here even more radically than in his
biological concept of instinct, his doctrine goes against the
traditions of empirical science. The unconscious functions for
Freud as a 'god-term' to use Kenneth Burke's suggestive epithet;
it is Freud's conceptual ultimate, a First Cause, to be believed in
precisely because it is both fundamental to and inaccessible to
experience. s
To which we might add Ernest Jones's comment that:
It is quite essential to distinguish between the hypothetical

aspects of the death instinct theory and clinical observations that
have become secondarily associated with it. Edward Bibring has
put this point well in the following statement. 'Instincts of life
and death are not psychologically perceptible as such; they are
biological instincts whose existence is required by hypothesis
alone. That being so, it follows that, strictly speaking, the theory
of the primal instincts is a concept which ought only to be
adduced in a theoretical context and not in a discussion of a
clinical or empirical nature. In them, the idea of aggressive and
destructive instincts will suffice to account for all the facts before
US'.6
At the heart of Freud's metapsychology are the indispensible

figurative tropes that offer a structural possibility in which to
construct empirical evidence. 'Since its materials are intimate,
concealed, difficult to define, and impossible to quantify,
psychoanalysis needs analogues, mental pictures. They may be

inexact but they are indispensible', says Peter Gay? These
metaphors and analogies question the production of the concepts
they both represent and help to create. In what way then, can one
validly discuss 'absence' and its relationship with figuration?
Poe's 'Eureka' is also fragmented by this conflict between
demonstration and analysis. In 'Eureka' proof is 'vulgar', being just
the data interpreted, and any interpretation will therefore do. As
Richard Wilbur points out, 'Poe fought an internal war with the
facts of reality from which he could never quite escape'.8 Indeed, for
Poe, the only real proof is proof as an ironic displacement of a logical
argument; proving science by denying the proof of science. This
denial we have already seen in Freud's discussion of the clinical
proof of sadism as a primary instinct. Poe's theory of nebulae is also
an example of this. Marie Bonaparte puts it succinctly:
The then recent discovery that Lord Rosse's new telescope had
reduced many apparent nebulae to clusters of stars, which to some
people appeared to invalidate Laplace's theory, on the contrary
seemed to confirm it to Poe. For, were his own theory of the
Divine emission of every atom in the Universe from the original
particles correct, then these, God's first creative acts, must have
occurred so remotely in time, that no trace of this primal nebulae,
gaseous substance would be apparent. 9
Poe begins by stating that the universe has been scientifically

considered to have began with nebulae and that the empi~ical proof
of this is that nebulae have been observed in outer space. However,
Poe now turns this proof on its head by stating that if nebulae did
still exist his theory would be wrong, therefore the discoverers of
nebulae are themselves wrong and nebulae no longer exist. As the
then 'modern' Rosse telescope 'proved' nebulae not to exist so Poe's
theory is proved correct in that nebulae only existed at the dawn of
time.
The irony is that nebulae prove Poe's theory exactly because, like
the death instinct, they exist in absentia. Absence becomes proof of
existence. Every obstacle to the theory is therefore recuperated as a
gain. They are embodied within a language that denies the
presence of the objects under analysis. By this denial Poe, is
ironically, forced to create a presence, providing a figurative
language in which to speak of the analytic object's non-presence.
Figurative language offers both Freud and Poe the opportunity to

create a theory based upon 'absence' and 'invisibility'.
If we are to re-apply the Freudian usage of metaphor it is
necessary to confront the attitude of both Joseph Breuer and Freud
toward what they considered the special, and conspicuously
dangerous and 'misleading' aspect of metaphor-as-analogy in
connection with descriptions of the topography, motivation and
workings of the psyche. In 'Studies on Hysteria' Joseph Breuer
cautioned psychologists on the use of descriptive metaphor,
specifically against treating it as a structure in 'reality' from which
'objective' assessments could be made, he writes:
If it seems to us, as it does to Binet and Janet, that what lies at the
centre of hysteria is a splitting off of a portion of psychical
activity, it is our duty to be as clear as possible on this subject. It is
only too easy to fall into a habit of thought which assumes that
every substantive has a substance behind it - which gradually
comes to regard 'consciousness' as standing for some actual
thing; and when we have become accustomed to make use
metaphorically of spatial relations, as in the term 'sub -
consciousness', we find as time goes on that we have actually
formed an idea which has lost its metaphorical nature and which
we can manipulate easily as though it was real. Our mythology is
then complete.
All our thinking tends to be accompanied and aided by spatial
ideas, and we talk in spatial metaphors. Thus when we speak of
ideas which are found in the region of clear consciousness and of
unconscious ones which never enter the full light of self-
consciousness, we almost inevitably form pictures of a tree with
its trunk in daylight and its roots in darkness, or of a building
with its dark underground cellars. If, however, we constantly
bear in mind that all such spatial relations are metaphorical and
do not allow ourselves to be misled into supposing that these
relations are literally present in the brain, we may nevertheless
speak of a consciousness and a subconsciousness. But only on
this condition.lO
Despite this warning the progress of psychoanalysis depended

upon metaphoric appropriation, which practice Freud hoped
would, paradoxically, become transparent and 'neutral' at the
attainment of the object under analysis. Although for Freud
metaphors were generated by the consideration of certain difficult

to conceive concepts, they were also productive of concepts:
concept and its metaphor being indissolutely linked by figuration.
By this configuration metaphor gave to concepts form, colour and
cultural content. Yet metaphor was required to become invisible at
the very moment it gave colouration to the concept (which itself was
to be considered to be both 'pure' and to transcend its analogy).
Neil Hertz points out that it is within the nature of Freud's own
language to add colour to that which otherwise would be absent
and by so doing be productive of those now figured absences:
The relation between the erotic instincts and the death instinct
comes to sound very much like the relationship Freud described
elsewhere in 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle', between his own
figurative language and the 'bewildering and obscure processes'
with which he was concerned:
'We need not feel greatly disturbed in judging our speculations
upon the life and death instincts by the fact that so many
bewildering and obscure processes occur in it - such as one
instinct being driven out by another, or an instinct turning from
the ego to an object, and so on. This is merely due to our being
obliged to operate with the scientific terms, that is to say with the
figurative language, peculiar to psychology (or, more precisely to
depth psychology). We could not otherwise describe the
processes in question at all, and indeed we could not have
become aware of them' .... Freud sees his figurative language
as a means of lending colours to what is otherwise impercep-
tible.!!
Thus, Freud's language gives momentum to the processes he

wished to describe without being accorded a status, or more
correctly being accorded the neutral or objective status of 'scientific
terms' through which, by a network of obligations, he is forced to
work. 12 The stain, while it is necessitated by the requirement of
those absences that require colouration ('we could not otherwise
describe the processes in question'), likewise permeates those
absent/presences with its own presence. 13 In other words, the
literary or fictional necessity of 'depth psychology' gives a status to
those absences which operate through it. The 'gap' between the
stain and the absence-made-present, between the concept and its
figuration is closed, or more propertly never existed, for Freud is
obliged to operate a system which presupposes an accommodation

between language, world and process. In 'The Uncanny' Freud tries
to understand the experiencing of this process of accommodation
and in that essay he cannot find a place in which to rest his theory.
Beyond Freud, beyond Poe, we are faced with the central
requirement of any theory whether artistic or scientific, that it
appropriates a specific language for its own exclusive discourse.
Yet, it is this' appropriate' language that often reveals the problems
inherent in a system of which it is both productive and a product.
Wolfgang Iser has shown that the 'closure' of a theoretical system is
often re-opened by the tropes it employs. We return to the use of
metaphor, 'theories', Iser points out, 'generally assume plausibility
through closure of the framework provided, they often attain
closure only through the introduction of metaphors. Polyphonic
harmony (the strata of the work merging together) is the favourite
metaphor of phenomenological theory; the fusion of horizons
(between the past experience embodied in the text and the
disposition of the recipient) is a metaphor basic to hermeneutics' .14
It is through the use of a complex web of metaphorical structures
that both Poe and Freud move into their spheres of theorizing
proper - the open arena of pure speculation. For Freud we have
already seen how empirical data, that is, the province of 'biological'
science can be manipulated and therefore invalidated. He writes,
'thus in so far as figures of this kind prove anything, the
immortality of the protista seemed to be experimentally
demonstrable .... Other experimentors arrived at different results',
which in most respects echoes Poe, when he says of Humboldt, 'his
theme, in its last result is the law of each portion of the merely
physical Universe'. 15 With 'merely physical' facts left in the realm of
simple phenomena, it is necessary for both Poe and Freud to create
a method whereby the laws governing appearances are disclosed
beyond empiricism: laws primarily based on speculative knowledge.
We have already seen the use of metaphoric colouring that both
writers employ to 'stain' (to make obvious) their speculative
targets. Its ultimate aim for both is to make the hypothetical into a
form of objective knowledge; 'but it must be admitted that in this case
we shall be working upon an equation with two unknown
quantities', says Freud of the two drives. Thus, the need of an
operative language, which is of a purpose no longer impartial and
cannot be so by necessity: Freud continues, 'this is merely due to
our being obliged to operate with the scientific terms, that is to say
with the figurative language - peculiar to psychology or, more

precisely, to depth psychology'Y'
Here, then, we arrive at the new form of hypothetical calculating
necessary in the sphere of this new knowledge. For both writers
will begin not from empirical data, but from inferential theorizing.
They begin then from where those sciences using clinical or
astronomical detail would conclude and they begin at the very end of
the scientific project. Poe writes, 'now this result (empirical fact) is in
the fullest keeping with that which I have reached unempirically',
which is echoed by Freud when he says, 'we have arrived at these
speculative assumptions in an attempt to describe and to account
for the facts of daily observation in our field of study'Y
What this leads to is the clearing of a space for hypothetical
considerations at the outset of the two projects; empirical fact, 'the
war neuroses', 'fort/da', 'nebular theory', 'cosmic distances' are all
then subordinated to the principle of hypothesis as an act in itself. IS
Freud posits this view some way through 'Beyond the Pleasure
Principle' in the lines, 'what follows is speculation, often
far-fetched speculation ... an attempt to follow out an idea
consistently, out of curiosity to see where it willlead'.I'l
But this is a clever offsetting of the reader's suspicion of the
hypothesis of the drives. It also legitimizes that which was
pure hypothesis at the very beginning of Freud's work, for at the
first paragraph Freud posits as fact his hypothetical meta-
psychology:
In the theory of psycho-analysis we have no hesitation in

assuming that the course taken by mental events is automatically
regulated by the pleasure principle. We believe, that is to say, that
the course of those events is invariably set in motion by an
unpleasurable tension, and that it takes a direction such that its
final outcome coincides with a lowering of that tension - that is,
with an avoidance of unpleasure or a production of pleasure. In
taking that course into account in our consideration of the mental
processes which are the subject of our study, we are introducing
an 'economic' point of view into our work; and if, in describing
those processes, we try to estimate this 'economic' factor in
addition to the 'topographical' and 'dynamic' ones, we shall, I
think, be giving the most complete description of them of which
we can at present conceive, and one which deserves to be
distinguished by the term 'metapsychological'.211
A close reading of this paragraph shows distinctly the urgent

necessity of his original hypothesis being accepted as fact, and in
total by the reader, before further speculations can be embarked
upon. He begins 'we have no hesitation', in what? 'in assuming'.
Thus, Freud begins in positive doubt which translates for the
reader into an objective fact - specifically of the discourse of
psychoanalysis. The 'pleasure principle' is introduced as an
accomplished fact, one moreover, as it is a diminution of tension,
which is paradoxical. This is regulated through the metaphors of
the 'economic', 'topographical' and 'dynamic' which will give it
colour and substance and finally termed 'metapsychological' as a
procedural and conceptual substantive. Freud continues, 'it is of no
concern to us in this connection to enquire how far, with this
hypothesis of the pleasure principle, we have approached or
adopted any particular, historically established, philosophical
system,.21 This provides Freud's system with a well understood
parallel, one moreover, that is 'historically established' and
therefore, one which by its legitimacy offers the proof of a valid
practice. Freud's thesis begins then in positive assertion, without
hesitancy, over the very fact of the hypothesis itself.
Poe, also aware of the problem of the neutrality or otherwise of
metaphoric language says this in equally positive terms:
To explain: - The Newtonian Gravity - a law of Nature - a law

whose existence as such no one out of Bedlam questions - a law
whose admission as such enables us to account for ninetenths of
the Universal phenomena - a law which, merely because it does
so enable us to account for these phenomena, we are perfectly
willing, without reference to any other considerations, to admit,
and cannot help admitting, as a law - a law, nevertheless, of
which neither the principle nor the modus operandi of the
principle, has ever yet been traced by the human analysis - a law,
in short, which, neither in its detail nor in its generality, has been
found susceptible of explanation at all- is at length seen to be at
every point thoroughly explicable, provided we only yield our
assent to - what? To an hypothesis? Why if an hypothesis - if the
merest hypothesis - if an hypothesis for whose assumption - as
in the case of that pure hypothesis the Newtonian law itself - no
shadow of a priori reason could be assigned - if an hypothesis,
even so absolute as all this implies, would enable us to perceive a
principle for the Newtonian law - would enable us to understand
as satisfied, conditions so miraculously - so ineffably complex

and seemingly irreconcileable as those involved in the relations
of which Gravity tells us,-what rational being could so expose his
fatuity as to call even this absolute hypothesis an hypothesis any
longer - unless, indeed he were to persist in so calling it, with the
understanding that he did so, simply for the sake of consistency
in words?22
Poe begins by delineating 'the Newtonian Gravity', as a law,

which Poe tells us with curious ambiguity 'no one out of Bedlam
questions'. Yet, Poe is interested in the 'modus operandi' and 'the
principle' behind a law which only colours these primal processes as
its representatives.
To explain these processes which Poe says are 'explicable', it is
necessary to 'assent' to 'an hypothesis'. This hypothesis will allow
Poe to make his theory into a new and unified law. Hence, Poe calls
the hypothesis both 'pure' and 'absolute'. Hypothesis is now a
speculative law both behind Newtonian gravity and the idea of
theoretics. This hypothesis explains all the particulars that the
Newtonian Law leaves in abeyance and thus asks Poe, 'what
rational being could so expose his fatuity as to call even this absolute
hypothesis an hypothesis any longer'. This hypothesis takes its
place as a law of analysis, and ironically the consistency of its
repetition in the text only goes to reinforce its authority. And again,
as with Freud, we are struck by the movement from speculation, to
hypothesis, to hypothesis-as-truth as an operative law behind (just
as the drives lay behind) the phenomena which colour its
existence.
Returning to Freud we see that the very nature of the subject
precludes the need for empirical data. 'The pleasure principle
follows from the principle of constancy- actually the latter principle
was inferred from the facts which forced us to adopt the pleasure
principle.123 What does this mean? Its radical ambiguity of meaning
and construction makes this sentence follow a curious pattern of
reversal. While the 'pleasure principle follows from the principle of
constancy' nevertheless this is syntactically reversed in the next
clause where it is 'the latter principle' that 'forced the pleasure
principle' to be adopted. But this 'forced' is founded upon the
processes 'inferred' from 'facts' never themselves given and these
facts themselves are twice removed from the 'principle of
constancy' which is finally inferred from the 'pleasure principle'.
Freud's 'latter principle' is a matter of inference from facts which

are nowhere present except as they are hypothesised as the pleasure
principle. Moreover, this becomes clearer when Freud writes that:
The specific unpleasure of physical pain is probably the result of

the protective shield having been broken through in a limited
area. There is a continuous stream of excitations from the part of
the periphery concerned to the central apparatus of the mind,
such as could normally arise only from within the apparatus. And
how shall we expect the mind to react to this invasion? Cathectic
energy is summoned from all sides to provide sufficiently high
cathexes of energy in the environs of the breach. An 'anticathexis'
on a grand scale is set up, for whose benefit all the other psychical
systems are impoverished, so that the remaining psychical
functions are extensively paralysed or reduced. We must
endeavour to draw a lessen from examples such as this and use
them as a basis for our metapsychological speculations. 24
While Freud draws conclusions from this an 'example' we may

question the nature of the dynamics of such an example. The
answer quite simply at first is that it is like Poe's definition of
infinity the 'thought of a thought'.2slt dwells beyond the world of
referentiality, for as an example its referentiality is curtailed
absolutely by the non-referentiality of its referent: that is the
'lesson' is drawn 'from examples such as' the hypothesis of
'cathexes' and 'anticathexes' in psychic life.
It is, as Poe understands it, only those that cannot see 'mere'
phenomena that arrive at the truth, 'Laplace's real strength lay', he
says, 'in fact, in an almost miraculous mathematical instinct: - on
this he relied; and in no instance did it fail or deceive him: - in the
case of the Nebular Cosmogony, it led him, blindfolded, through a
labyrinth of Error, into one of the most luminous and stupendous
temples of Truth'. 26 Only by intuition says Poe can such work bring
the truth. Thus, in 'Eureka' Poe says, 'Kepler admitted that these
laws he guessed'.27 Through the 'labyrinth of Error', the empirical
data of 'Nebular theory', the great scientist proceeds 'blindfolded'
and yet 'led' by 'instinct'. Blindness begins for Poe to equal insight.
Poe and Freud (from the outset) need to legitimize the force of
their theoretics. Freud does this by assumption, that is, he assumes
psychoanalysis at the time he pens 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle'
to be a legitimate science with a clearly defined set of rules, while
Poe does so by arguing the theoretical legitimacy of a cosmology

uninhibited by relation to the 'facts' of recorded astronomical
sightings. What he saw in Kepler and Laplace was in the last resort a
matter of combining the intuition of the poet with the rigour of the
mathematician. In 'Eureka' Poe triumphantly concludes, 'we thus
establish the Universe on a purely geometrical basis' which Poe
sees his own cosmological theory as completing through a
corrective swerve over the work of his predecessors. 28 Of this
Bonaparte writes, 'such is the judgement which Poe, having solved
the riddle of the Universe, passes on his over timid precursor' .29 Poe
continued to attack empiricists throughout 'Eureka' indeed, 'all
attempts at generalization', Poe tells us of this scientific fantasy
history, 'were met at once by the words "theoretical", "theory",
"theorist" - all thought, to be brief, was properly resented as a
personal affront to themselves' [empiricistsj.3o He continues of his
fantasy heroes, 'these latter - our Keplers - our Laplaces -
'speculate' - 'theorize' - these are the terms - can you not fancy the
shout of scorn with which they would be received by our
progenitors, were it possible for them to be looking over my
shoulders as I write?,31 And thus Poe makes of himself, a dramatic
character, (a hero like 'Kepler' or 'Laplace'?) of his own tale.
* * *
As Freud refers to the 'poets and philosophers' in 'Beyond the
Pleasure Principle' so Poe equates the movement of his theoretics to
the form of a poem: 32
In the ... processes of Science ... according to the schools, I prove

nothing. So be it: - I design but to suggest - and to convince
through the suggestion. I am proudly aware that there exist many
of the most profound and cautiously discriminative human
intellects which cannot help being abundantly content with my-
suggestions. To these intellects - as to my own - there is no
mathematical demonstration which could bring the least
additional true proof of the great Truth which I have advanced -
the truth of Original Unity as the source - as principle of the
Universal PhenomenaY
Thus, by degrees, Poe argues that his rejection by the 'schools' of

science allows him the leeway to speculate ('my suggestions')
beyond the merely 'mathematical' whose proof is incompetant in

the face of what he wishes to announce. In so doing Poe
circumvents two discourses of 'truth' to propose an ultimate,
intuitive truth: 'original unity'. Hypothesis and speculation
therefore allow Poe to formulate a rule for the foundation upon
which the discourses he rejects will rely. Poe's intuition defies
scientific analysis and absents itself in its formulation.
It is Poe's soul-reverie and Freud's advocacy for the devil that
take us to the absolute border of poetic/scientific discourse. 34 It is as
if the whole subject and movement of both 'Beyond the Pleasure
Principle' and 'Eureka' was toward a fictive speculation, a new form
of fiction neither poem, nor science, nor philosophy, a form in
which Freud says he, 'must endeavour to construct a narrative in
which subjective and objective attitudes, biographical and
historical interests, are combined in a new proportion?5 Thus, the
dynamics of the text of 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' lead from
'speculation' to 'sober' method to certainty:
What follows is speculation, often far fetched speculation, which

the reader will consider or dismiss according to his individual
predilection ....
We seek only for the sober results of research or of reflections
based on it; and we have no wish to find in those results any
quality other than certainty ....
We have drawn far-reaching conclusions from the hypothesis
that all living substance is bound to die from internal causes. We
made this assumption thus carelessly because it does not seem to
us to be an assumption. We are accustomed to think that such is
the fact, and we are strengthened in our thought by the writings
of our poets.36
Thus, strengthened 'by the writings of our poets' the speculation

Freud sets out with is merely a gloss for the certainty he knew his
theory always possessed even before he wrote. The carelessness of
the assumption is in fact built upon the most rigorous of
foundations and is not a speculation but an axiomatic truth. The
'sober results of research' contradict this speculatory rhetoric and
work toward a certainty that is part of the construction of the text
itself.
Poe's anxiety over his text explores in subtle ways the
relationship of truth with the creative act implying the problematic
relationship of the text to that of which it speaks. The text, however,

is marked initially by the same movement from speculation to an
appeal to method to absolute certainty. Poe begins by refuting the
possibility of there ever being such a thing as a permanent truth
and that axiomatic truth as such has never existed:
The simple truth is, that the Aristotelians erected their castles
upon a basis far less reliable than air; for no such things as axioms
ever existed or can possible exist at all. ... These and numerous
similar propositions formerly accepted, without hesitation, as
axioms, or undeniable truths, were, even at the period of which I
speak, seen to be altogether untenable: - how absurd in these
people, then, to persist in relying upon a basis, as immutable,
whose mutability had become so repeatedly manifest. 37
We are not surprised that such an enlightened comment should

be made in the italics of an axiom, for throughout the text it
struggles with itself to provide a location for a truth which
according to Poe is not only hidden but is undemonstrable once it is
found; 'no truths are self-evident', for truth lies deep within the soul
and it is only from there that it can be perceived?8 Facts which can
be demonstrated for Poe are a second order of truth, a working
reality that is the mundane 'surface' that protects the essence. Thus,
when Poe comes to justify his conclusion he does so by appealing to
that faculty in man that deduces without recourse to analysis. In
other words Poe bases his 'assumptions' on the fact that his genius
has discovered them. What the soul understands the intellect can
only grasp imperfectly, thus, Poe like Freud also uses the word
'assumption' paradoxically to mean a position of certainty based on
exactitude:
I use the word 'assumption' in its ordinary sense: yet I maintain

that even this my primary proposition, is very, very far indeed,
from being really a mere assumption. Nothing was ever more
certainly- no human conclusion was ever, in fact, more regularly
- more rigorously deduced: - but alas! the processes lie out of the
human analysis - at all events are beyond the utterance of the
human tongue?9
Poe's defence of his 'assumption' is with the anxiety engendered

when you cannot produce proof. Hence, the piling up of
subordinate clauses beginning 'certainly', 'regularly',

'rigourously'. The oxymoron created by 'rigourously deduced',
leads ironically to an 'alas' that all these 'processes' lie outside
'human analysis' and are beyond the 'human tongue', the extra
irony being that because they are only available through the
utterance of a text it is exactly in this realm that they exist at all. In
what way are speculation and fact linked?
Exactly in the realm of 'speculation' scientific observation must
yield for it cannot progress further. To make that next leap Freud
must base his observations upon the fictive imagination, he must
find his 'proof' in art. Yet, the incompatibility of this association
deeply disturbs Freud, going as it does, necessarily, against the
flow of a logically progressive argument. The confirmation that is in
art or literature rends the text apart, for its disquieting
pronouncement is that science cannot venture further without the
help of the artist. Freud's anxiety over using the theory that Plato
put into the mouth of Aristophanes in The Symposium is that, while
fiction (as poetry) is an artistic fabrication (a lie) it also is absolutely
necessary as proof (a truth).40 This paradoxical situation leads Freud
to base his conclusions (the 'factual proof' he needs) neither upon
empirical, theoretical, nor scientific foundations. He wishes to
withdraw from speaking of this matter, but he cannot. He must take
refuge in the 'fantastic' to confirm the scientific. He writes:
Science has so little to tell us about the origin of sexuality that we

can liken the problem to a darkness into which not so much as a
ray of hypothesis has penetrated. In quite a different region, it is
true, we do meet with such a hypothesis; but it is of so fantastic a
kind - a myth rather than a scientific explanation - that I should
not venture to produce it here, were it not that it fulfils precisely
the one condition whose fulfilment we desire. For it traces the
origin of an instinct to a need to restore an earlier state of thingsY
Again we see that hesitancy, ('I should not venture to produce'),

that marks Freud's recourse to myth. The myths of the Greeks,
touching as they do on certain truths become the myths of the
psychoanalytic construction of the psyche. Moreover, the text
displays a fear over the very incompatibility of myth and science
('but it is of so fantastic a kind - a myth rather than a scientific
explanation'), a fear that extends to the anxiety psychoanalysis felt
over its relationship to the more 'legitimate' and established
sciences: biology, anatomy and neurology.42
In an implicit apology for what he has just written Freud returns

to the scientific by way of excusing himself that he only followed a
certain 'hint given by the poet-philosopher'. Nevertheless, Freud
cannot finally resolve this incompatibility, for when he says, 'I
think the moment has come for breaking off' he finds himself
unable to do SO.43 'Not however', he continues, 'without the
addition of a few words of critical reflection.' 'Critical reflection' on
the act of hypothesis does not return it to the 'facts' but helps that
very hypothesis to expand by the' critical reflection' itself becoming
part of the hypothesis:
Not however, without the addition of a few words of critical

reflection. It may be asked whether and how far I am myself
convinced of the truth of the hypotheses that have been set out in
these pages. My answer would be that I am not convinced myself
and that I do not seek to persuade other people to believe in them.
Or, more precisely, that I do not know how far I believe in them.
There is no reason, as it seems to me, why the emotional factor of
conviction should enter into this question at all. It is surely
possible to throw oneself into a line of thought and to follow it
wherever it leads out of simple scientific curiosity, or, if the
reader prefers, as an 'advocatus diabolis', who is not on that
account himself sold to the devil. I do not dispute the fact that the
third step in the theory of the instincts, which I have taken here,
cannot lay claim to the same degree of certainty as the two earlier
ones - the extension of the concept of sexuality and the
hypothesis of narcissism. 44
Again Freud casts himself in the role of the devil's advocate: an

advocate of daemonic speculation.
Jacques Derrida having written extensively on this problem in
'Speculations - On Freud' writes of this movement toward the
merging of speculative content and form:
You must by now think that I am myself twisting the Freudian

usage of 'speculation', his usage of the word, of the notion, of the
concept. Where Freud seems to make of it a mode of research, a
theoretical attitude, I consider it also as the object of his
discourse. I act as if Freud not only set about speaking
speculatively of this or that (e.g. of the beyond of the pleasure
principle) but already spoke of speculation, of the possibility of
speculation. I act as if he analyses, e.g. the relations between the
two principles, were already an element of speculative structure

in general.
I do all this certainly, and I maintain that it must be done in order
to get at what is here in play beyond the 'given' (and therefore
refused, taken back, retained), beyond the principle of what
Freud says presently, if something of the sort were possible, on
the subject of speculation. In his text something must answer for
the speculation of which he speaks, but this deviation by
reapplication does not satisfy me. I also maintain that speculation
is not only a mode of research named by Freud, not only the
object of his discourse, but also the operation of his writing, what
he is doing in writing what he is writing here, that which makes
him do it and that which causes to be done, that which makes him
write and that which he causes to be written.
Any philosophy that spoke about the subject or the subjective
affect would thereby be phenomenological in its essence. Now
here the very possibility of a speculation which would be neither
philosophical nor scientific in the classical sense ... but which
would nevertheless open up another science or another fiction,
this speculative possibility presupposes something which is here
called repression, namely that which for example allows a
pleasure to be lived as unpleasure. 45
And this (as in a circle the pleasure/unpleasure dialectic)

re-presents the frame of 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' in its form
of literary production, a literature as Derrida says is 'another
science or another fiction' in which 'speculative possibility'
becomes the ultimate subject.
It is hardly surprising then that knowing something (as Freud
already pointed out) does not make it accessible to demonstration.
Kepler, says Poe of his hero, knew the universal laws without being
able to say how he knew them. 46 Kepler knew and did not know, his
ability was in his intuition, the ability to grasp and connect without
the operation of analysable method. It is interesting to note that
Freud also took as his hero Kepler, 'so great was his admiration for
Fliess's pioneering discoveries in this domain that Freud', says
Ernest Jones, 'bestowed upon his friend the title of "the Kepler of
biology" 'Y For both Poe and Freud, Kepler is the alchemist-
scientist who, by a supreme act of intuition, can grasp this
understanding of quality without being able to offer a quantifiable
justification for it. For, indeed, a quantifiable demonstration of a
quality is neither possible for Freud as a metapsychologist nor

desirable for Poe as a theoretician.
The pursuit of the quantifiable always ends for Poe and Freud in
the discovery of the animating spirit, which is spirit before it
becomes matter. In other words, the pursuit of quantity ends in the
discovery of 'quality' (or 'motion') and it is quality that is the
principle of animation in the universe. Hence, for a Kepler, or a
Newton, or a Poe (according to Poe) the quantifiability of facts is
only a crude approximation to the discovery of the moral quality that
governs the laws of existence. For Poe, 'all that the man of genius
demands for his exaltation is moral matter in motion. It makes no
difference whither tends the motion - whether for him or against
him - and it is absolutely of no consequence "What is the
matter" '.48
The use of figurative language argues against the possibility in
Freud and Poe of the self-presence of the object under analysis and
against the self-presence of the language of the analysis through
which the object is analysed. Furthermore, metaphoric figuration
allows both Freud and Poe to concentrate on the speculative,
hypothetical and ultimately 'invisible' relationships and causes
that are generated by their texts. In so doing, they require us to
reread the metaphors that are created by them and through which
their concepts are generated. Chapter 5 will concentrate upon
Freud's 'Eternal City' metaphor49 and look at its relevance both in
relation to the embodiment of the psyche in language and the
position that the reader/analyst has to adopt in 'observing' such a
structure.
5
The Wizardry of Language
Freud's 'Eternal City' Metaphor and
Poe's Circumlocution; the position of
the Analyst as Observer and its
relevance to the Relationship of the
Psyche, Language and Text
The following remarks on Freud's 'Eternal City' metaphor are

necessitated by the refusal of numerous other commentators to take
Freud's metaphor to a conclusion Freud could not, or would not,
envisage. Wolf and Nebel's study of Freud's use of metaphor does
not mention this piece of his rhetoric and Philip Rieff comments
that the 'comparison of analyst with archeologist is invalidated' and
goes on, with Freud, to dismiss 'spatial metaphors'.l Peter Gay
trying to offer a commonsense reading to the metaphor, continues
in Rieff's vein when he tells us, 'Freud is always willing to play with
metaphors; they have their uses. But they are not proof; they are
only metaphors.,2 It is precisely on the point of taking Freud's
metaphor as a vital, transformational matrix which itself constitutes
a sort of proof, that we are invited to comprehend Freud's rhetoric
in its own rhetorical vitality.
Freud writes of his scientific project in the celebrated case of
Judge Schreber:
Is it not an act of irresponsible levity, an indiscretion and a

calumny, to charge a man of such high ethical standing as the
former Senatsprasident Schreber with homosexuality? - No. The
patient has himself informed the world at large of his phantasy of
being transformed into a woman, and he has allowed all personal
considerations to be outweighed by interests of a higher nature.
Thus he has himself given us the right to occupy ourselves with
his phantasy, and in translating it into the technical terminology
62
The Wizardry of Language 63
of medicine we have not made the slightest addition to its

content. 3
Here, the metaphoric substance of Freud's science becomes

invisible to allow an objective understanding of the analytic case,
science 'in translating' the phantasy into 'the technical terminology
of medicine', must at that moment become a neutral medium
through which to view the objective fact. It is this equalization of
objective fact to neutral medium that tantalizingly authorizes the
appropriating discourse through its objects. Freud requires that his
metaphors, even at the moment of their self-neutralization, perform
the following various functions: to 'contain or transmit knowledge,
to directly connect with facts, and to allow access to genuine
meaning,. 4 'In this way the neurological model, designed to be an
analog of the brain', says Anthony Wilden, 'turns out to be a model
of the processes of writing metaphor in communication and in
language, for a metaphor, a symptom, is a transmitted sign, or
series of signs .... He [Freud] has taught us that any scientific
theory is a set of metaphors, and that sometimes an analysis of those
metaphors as metaphors, or their replacement by others, is the only
way to get to ... a text.'s Here, Wilden observes that the
'neurological model' turns out to be a model of something else ('the
processes of writing') even as it gives a structure to the nervous
system. In so doing it becomes involved in various forms of
communicative model including those of inscriptive, hieroglyphic
and symbolic representation. In what way does Freud resolve
this problem of representation in his figurative models of the
psyche?
The simple structure of surface and depth, which Freud
encountered in Dora's narratives was corrected by Freud initially
by recourse to the idea of averdeterminatian. However, this implied
a too ready analogy to an object made up of 'layers'. With the
notions of a transference of affect from one psychically charged
object to another, and the ideas of overdetermination and
transference between analyst and analysed, Freud's notion of
textuality becomes immensely more complex. To resolve the
theoretical difficulty of representing this complexity Freud begins
to use more and more complicated metaphors and analogies to
explain mental phenomena. Hence, in describing the elemental
relationships between the 'dream-thoughts' and 'the dream-work',
Freud requestions his original concepts of latent and manifest and
in so doing highlights an essential difference between dream

'syntax' and literary syntax:
The different portions of this complicated structure, stand, of

course, in the most manifold logical relations to one another.
They can represent foreground and background, digressions and
illustrations, conditions, chains of evidence and counter
arguments. When the whole mass of these dream-thoughts is
brought under pressure of the dream-work, and its elements are
turned about, broken into fragments and jammed together -
almost like pack-ice - the question arises of what happens to the
logical connections which have hitherto formed its framework.
What representations do dreams provide for 'if', 'because', 'just
as', 'although', 'either-or', and all the other conjunctions without
which we cannot understand sentences or speeches?6
In Freud's metaphor, we are to consider the structure created by

'dream-thoughts' and the 'dream-work' as one in which the
structure is a structure precisely because it has become
'fragmented', 'manifold', made up of 'broken fragments'. In such a
model the very possibility of disentangling one portion or of
examining one strata (or layer) is put at risk. Moreover, as the strata
are impacted, so to separate them would be impossible, hence,
conjunctions and abstract connections are nullified. Comparison,
as if each layer was in an analogical or mutual relationship to each
other, gives way to metaphor in which two opposite or contrary
layers are combined and only signify by their combination. In such
a structure antitheticalness would be of absolute importance.
Paradoxically, this returns Freud's theory to the problem of
working within language while confronting it. In language the
Freudian psyche is expressed. In the analogy of the 'city' and psychical
make-up Freud gives us a clear, though complex statement about
the function of the mental processes and the problem of the
repressed. Although he immediately disavows his portrait of the
mind/city we may take it that through its thorough working over it
was meant to be taken with much greater seriousness than Freud
would have us believe. He writes:
Now let us, by flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a

human habitation but a physical entity with a similarly long and
copious past - an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has
once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier
phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one.
This would mean that in Rome the palaces of the Caesars and the
Septizonium of Septimus Severus would still be rising to their
old height on the Palatine and that the castle of S. Angelo would
still be carrying on its battlements the beautiful statues which
graced it until the Siege by the Goths, and so on. But more than
this. In the place occupied by the Palazzo Caffarelli would once
more stand - without the Palazzo having to be removed - The
Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus; and this not only in its latest
shape, as the Romans of the Empire saw it, but also in its earliest
one, when it still showed Etruscan forms and was ornamented
with terracotta antefixae. Where the Coliseum now stands we
could at the same time admire Nero's vanished Golden House.
On the Piazza of the Pantheon we should find not only the
Pantheon of today, as itwas bequeathed to us by Hadrian, but, on
the same site, the original edifice erected by Agrippa; indeed, the
same piece of ground would be supporting the church of Santa
Maria sopra Minerva and the ancient temple over which it was
built. And the observer would perhaps only have to change the
direction of his glance or his position in order to call up the one
view or the other?
Freud seems carried away with this metaphor and in it he makes

some extremely important points concerning the visible and
invisible, the conscious and the repressed. We notice immediately
that both the visible and the invisible, the depth and the surface
occupy the same space. There is a certain depth in the layers of older
city buildings and a pure surface in that every edifice occupies the
same area. This metaphor explains why the act of literary analysis
can never simply find a text under the surface of its reading because
the analysed text is also on the surface, but a surface that, at the
moment the reading is invoked becomes invisible. The observer
shifting his view to the analytic text relinquishes the fullness of the
analysed text, puts it aside, looks through it and 'abolishes' it, not in
a destruction but in a redistribution of perspective. The two texts
work to erase each other. Nevertheless, any moment one will
become invisible and reveal the other. As one text becomes central
it squeezes the other text out onto the periphery. Only the observer
with his perception can shift these quantities and balance them.
Yet, this is exactly what the observer is unable to do, for the shift in
the scales is always radical and conclusive, either one or the other,
but not both may be brought into focus.
Precisely where Freud looked for stability and coherence (health),
his 'Eternal City' metaphor posits a perception without the anchor
of a stable visual field. Elements mix and intertwine, disconnect and
reconnect elsewhere, destroying a perception of either time or
space.
This is essentially the point reached by both Poe and Freud. Poe
writes 'in this ... we have proceeded step by step ... immediately
to perceive that space and duration are one'.s Freud writes in
'remarks' that 'must sound very obscure', that 'we have learnt that
unconscious mental processes are in themselves "timeless"',
(which) 'means in the first place that they are not ordered
temporally, that time does not change them in any way and that the
idea of time cannot be applied to them'. 9 These processes for
contrast can only be made apparent (as they lie outside a consciously
comprehensible time-space and therefore outside of thought
altogether, as a primary process) by comparison with 'conscious
mental processes,.lD However, a problem immediately arises, for
'the abstract idea of time seems to be wholly derived from the
method of working of the system Pcpt-Cs and to correspond to a
perception on its own part of that method of working'. For Freud,
consequently it is necessary to assign to this system of cognition a
'position in space' which means for Freud 'it must lie on the
borderline between outside and inside'Y We have already seen in
the concept of the 'Eternal City' that this position is one of constant
oscillation in a three-dimensional field of perceptual experience.
Moreover, Freud continues to show that this cognitive level is
itself merged into the unconscious 'timeless' levels. Thus, for Freud
as for Poe, space and time are conflated and merged; at once pure
surface and yet constructed through a system denoting depth:
space and time. In a system within time each layer can become
present, past and future and is no longer tied to a particular
moment. In space each layer has a relationship through
juxtaposition. The structure of time/space as represented by Freud
and Poe allows the past to occupy a position within the present as
the present may generate the past. Thus, Freud may become a
character in Poe's tales, and Poe's tales may be generated by Freud's
concepts.
This conflation highlights another aspect of the use of metaphor,
for inevitably it refuses to allow itself to be tied to a single and
unequivocal meaning. Thus, the very notion of an organic yet

'static' city, one in which the new arises on the site of the old and,
yet, the old does not decay, encases an incompatibility within its
own imagery that nevertheless is consistent only in connection
with the concept it embodies: the formation of the mental
apparatus in which 'the usurpation of space by the immaterial' is all
important. 12 Contradiction forms the basis of metaphoric
embodiment yet without this contradiction the system it embodies
would be theoretically disestablished. Thus, two oscillations are
inherent in the system, one between the spacial distance that
should separate old and new, and the other between the psyche and
its representation as an 'Eternal City'; in both form and content a
destabilizing occurs which partakes of a certain type of splitting.
Freud writes of one of his patients, 'no position of the libido which
had once been established was ever completely replaced by a later
one. It was rather left in existence side by side with all the others,
and this allowed him to maintain an incessant vacillation which
proved incompatible with the acquisition of a stable character'.13
Exactly this incompatibility between portions existing 'side by
side' animates and resolves the problem for Freud of creating a
dynamic model which would embody and generate all the special
features of the psychical apparatus.
Moreover, this model finds its animating principle in the
observer-analyst 'who would ... only have to change the directions
of his glance or his position in order to call up the one view or the
other'. The analyst becomes the focus for the view to which he is
attached by his 'glance' and 'position' and, therefore, a structuring
necessity for the view itself. In such a position the observer
although to one side of the view is also at the same time its central
focus: its locus for being brought to view. That central position,
while yet to one side, makes the observer a medium for the
transmitting of one or other view, but by so doing it disestablishes
the stability of the view that is transmitted, for the view itself is
dependent upon a mutual antagonism and, yet, total
interdependence between the structual possibilities it contains.
Freud's model begins first of all to offer an interesting
visualization of the relationship of signifier to signified - the
'Eternal City' represents the mind. Yet, at the same time because it
is a metaphor the 'Eternal City' represents civilization and the
entity of the metropolis, thus splitting the signified at the outset.
Indeed, the 'Eternal City' is continually slipping away from the
concept it represents. Thus, the invocation of the precise location of

'Rome' is transmuted from a 'human habitation' immediately into a
'physical entity', an organism precisely the same as, and yet totally
distanced and differentiated from, the psychological functions it
configures.
Having created a model in which history is immutable, Freud,
nevertheless, posits the possibility of change; the metaphor
contains a past and a future bound within the signification of the
present, made up as it is of past and future. So closely tied are they
that neither past nor present signify without each other and both
signify through each other's absolute interdependence. Made up as
they are, and mixed up as they are, one would literally collapse
without the other.
Furthermore, and most importantly, the metaphor, through the
observer's gaze, opens up the final possibility of a referent beyond
the sign which, while outside as a witness, an active participant
calling up either view at will, would simultaneously, also be
reinscribed within the sign to which it is attached as both a locus
and a projection. The observer would be productive and produced
by the landscape he observed. The observer truly observes but only
through the disassociation of a part of the ego from its other parts. It
is this disassociation that makes the analysis of the ego possible in
the first place, and which will create the metaphor through which
this is achieved.
As the diagram shows, the 'simple' sign has become a m6ebius
strip in which the past and present 'fold' and 'wind' into each other.
The placing of the observer in the middle means that either past or
present can be called up from the middle which is the 'future' of the
observer's choice of view. He it is who makes the flow lines of the
strip pull apart while they (beyond his control) flow in the same
direction.
hidden signified on
underside
It can be seen that following from right to left, 'A', while being the
undersurface, should be the signified it gestures toward, and, yet, at
the same time it fulfills the function of the top surface signifier. In
doing so the signified by being 'exposed' also becomes a signifier.

This holds true of the other surfaces of the strip. While surfaces 'e
and '8' represent a signifier and a signified, sides' A' and '0' make
this relationship far less certain.
Freud's metaphor, if it is to both adequately represent the
processes of the psyche and the psyche's production and
expression in language must meet the Saussurian demands placed
upon the process of signification. It is in Freud's metaphor of the
'Eternal City' that he finally produces a 'representation' that is both
productive of a topography and a dynamics while expressing a
dimension concerned with both time and space.
Saussure's signifier, being an utterance is unwound in the
dimension of time, a line joining past to future. 'The signifier, being
auditory', says Saussure, 'is unfolded solely in time from which it
gets the following characteristics: (a) it represents a span, and (b)
the span is measurable in a single dimension; it is a line'.14 This
dimension is open to change but insures continuity through the
continual change of its aggregate parts. It is this change in the
aggregate parts that provides for the restitution of history in the
signifier and its recuperation in the fabric of the future:
Time, which insures the continuity of language, wields another

influence apparently contradictory to the first: the more or less
rapid changes of linguistic signs. In a certain sense, therefore, we
can speak of both the immutability and the mutability of the sign.
In the last analysis, the two facts are interdependent: the sign is
exposed to alteration because it perpetuates itself. What
predominates in all changes is the persistence of the old
substance; disregard for the past is only relative. That is why the
principle of change is based on the principle of continuity.15
Freud's metaphor perfectly illustrates these foregoing remarks.

On the level of the description of the city as a signifier only the
image unfolds in a line and as an historical process, past and future
cojoined. In the same way the 'persistance of the old substance' in
the newer buildings - determined and determining of them - is
placed under the pressure of the presence of those new buildings
which nevertheless do not quite dislodge the previous edifices.
Indelibility is preserved within change. This indelibility is itself
preserved through the perception of the observer.
* * *
We have said that Freud's metaphor opens up the space of (and for)
the observer, for it is he who is placed within the chain of signifiers
as the repository of the 'associative series'. It is his presence which
activates the sign and places him inside its power. The observer's
glance shifts the direction toward either signifier or signified and
by being placed between the arrows of flow actually makes them
appear to pull in opposite directions. It is this that robs the observer
of the observation that the arrows follow one another and flow in
the same direction. In this, either observing the new city or the old
city, the architectural metaphor or its psychological counterpart
Freud seems to follow Saussure. Saussure demands a closure of one
of the observer's eyes and a fixity of position in order to call up the
plenitude of the sign at any present moment. The observer in
Saussure seems at once to find the plenitude of the sign by looking
only in one direction and in this he finds a 'panorama' of either the
'evolution' or the (present) 'state' of language. One can be viewed
but not both at any given moment. As Freud points out, 'the
observer would only have perhaps to change the direction of his
glance or his position in order to call up the one view or the other'.
The observer is therefore forced to break down the complexity of
the linguistic sign in order to know its components, but by so doing
is constrained to ignore or exclude from his view the very
conditions that precondition that which he observes. As in Freud
the observer as the analyst is essential to the understanding of the
presence of the sign:
That is why the linguist who wishes to understand a state must

discard all knowledge of everything that produced it and ignore
diachrony. He can enter the mind of speakers only by completely
suppressing the past. The intervention of history can only falsify
his judgement. It would be absurd to attempt to sketch a
panorama of the Alps by viewing them simultaneously from
several peaks of the Jura; a panorama must be made from a single
vantage point. The same applies to language; the linguist can
neither describe it nor draw up standards of usage except by
concentrating on one state. When he follows the evolution of the
language, he resembles the moving observer who goes from one
peak of the Jura to another in order to record the shifts in
perspective. 11>
Thus, Saussure's demand is radically exclusionist: 'one vantage

point' affords a view which suppresses the past, the other

suppresses the present. Hence, Saussure's conception of the
observer is one bound to only one or other view but not both
simultaneously. We have seen in Freud that his similar demand is
contradicted by the vitality of his metaphor and, thus, past and
present, 'state' and history, are simultaneously evoked. Poe
reconciles these views.
Using a similar 'natural' image to Saussure Poe makes this clear
once we turn to his conception of the observer's role. Here he
writes:
He who from the top of Aetna casts his eyes leisurely around is
affected chiefly by the extent and diversity of scene. Only be a
rapid whirling on his heel could he hope to comprehend the
panorama in the sublimity of its oneness. But as, on the summit of
Aetna, no man has thought to whirling on his heel, so no man has
ever taken into his brain the full uniqueness of the prospect; and
so, again, whatever considerations lie involved in this
uniqueness, have as yet no practical existence for mankind. 17
Transcending the view 'from the top of Aetna' yet at its centre, the
observer must, in order to give a singleness or 'oneness' to the view
perform a 'rapid whirling on his heel'. By becoming the spinning
axis the observer becomes a structural centre to a view, that (should
he cease spinning) would 'disappear'. The structure of the
panorama makes it a necessary prerequisite of the observer that
should he wish to observe the whole he must never cease spinning.
Stability and oneness (itself 'the extent ... of the scene') are
produced only be movement and 'diversity' (calling up each view
in rapid succession). Poe continues, 'it seems to me that, in aiming
at this latter effect, and, through it, at the consequences - the
conclusions - the suggestions - the speculations - or, if nothing
better offer itself, the mere guesses which may result form it - we
require something like a mental gyration on the heel'. IS Poe's
metaphor of the observer which itself can be 'applied' to our
argument shows Poe's own desire for a unifying principle invoked
by, but not in, the total possession of the observer, himself placed at
the centre of the panorama. Poe's observer is at once an unattached
figure in as much as he observes the scene before him, but at the
same time he takes on a position within the scene and becomes the
essential part of it. For Poe the observer as analyst or as narrator
brings into focus the 'oneness' of the scene in a radical way, for the
scene is both filtered through him and observed by him. Unlike
Saussure, Poe and Freud do not, in their figurative metaphors, find
any need to disassociate simultaneous observation from the totality
of the concept to be observed. Both Freud and Poe evoke a
simultaneous response on various psychological and aesthetic
levels without requiring a disjunction between those levels. Thus,
the disjunction is only created to allow for a more complete
association. 'In this', says Poe, lies 'individuality of impression.,19
While Freud's observer seems to be outside of the landscape he
views, yet is an intimate projection and requirement of it, so Poe's
observer by shifting the balance of the critical frame actually places
himself within the system by changing, as an outsider, the internal
relations of the panorama he views. Hence, as Saussure tells us,
'anything that changes the system in any way is internal'.20
'Regardless of what the forces of change are, whether in isolation or
in combination, they always result in a shift in the relationship
between the signified and the signifier.'21
Precisely what the observer changes 'internally' is the balance
within the sign itself. His dynamic intervention shifts the
topography of the sign itself and thereby radically intervenes in the
process of the creation of the sign as a 'closed' unit. By doing so the
observer questions the methods of the production of the sign.
Saussure points out the dimension of association that exists in
the 'brain', a dimension he tells us outside 'discourse'. But this
dichotomy that makes thought prior to speech and speech the mere
utterance of thought, and language the merest representation of
that thought is rejected promptly by Saussure. Saussure writes that,
'without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula. There are
no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance
of language',22
Language will (for Poe, Freud and Saussure) therefore both
'express' the thought and 'create' the thought. Moreover, it is in
language that the total constitution of the psyche's presence can be
made utterable. Psychoanalysis 'finds' the unconscious produced
by and productive of the conscious verbal utterance; its dimension
is in language. Unvoiced signifieds are named as they surface in the
signifier and as they enter into the life of the signifier, becoming
signifiers themselves as they are brought into the compass of the
accessible memory (which comes into being through utterance).
Signs, like metaphor, are properly impure. What they bring into
presence is continually delayed while being immediately present as

the 'essential' element of the metaphor which neither of the
metaphor's signifiers contain alone. The metaphor, like the sign for
Saussure, is a real 'entity', an 'object' not made up of substance, but
of 'abstractions'; non-presences which by their combination (a
combination of minus terms) makes a positive, tactile creation. 'The
signs that make up language are not abstractions but real objects;
signs and their relations are what linguistics studies; they are the
concrete entitities of our science ... whenever only one element is
retained, the entity vanishes; instead of a concrete object we are
faced with a mere abstraction: 23
This diversion into the similarities between Freud's use of
metaphor and Saussure's concept of the 'sign' not only returns us to
Poe's attitude toward narrative and interpretation but also gives us
a specific type of model for reading and analysis which is
continually invoked by Poe, without being theorized by him.
* * *
In our attempt to define Freud and Poe's relationship to each other it

has been necessary to look carefully at Freud's production of a
model of the psyche and its processing through and functioning in
language and Poe's model of textuality as it is processed through
and functions within a model of the psyche. Throughout the
preceding chapters I have attempted to integrate these two modes
of experience through the use by both authors of a figurative
language within which they discuss or exploit various' absent' laws
and structures.
By looking at Freud and Poe's 'understanding' of signification
and the position of the observer in that process we have seen that
the observer at once transcends yet is integral to the panorama
(textually produced) that he observes. The analysis of the text's
structure then resolves itself upon the analyst. How is the text
generated by while generative of the response of a reader whose
rapid 'gyrations' give unity and yet do so by disrupting it? Indeed,
how is the text related to the reader's psyche and the reader's
psyche involved in the text? What mechanisms of the text
correspond to those of the psyche? We have, of course, partially
answered that question in the preceeding chapters of this essay
relating various psychoanalytic and textual (narrational, thematic,
allegorical, stylistic) practices to one another. The following
chapters are concerned with exploring the repercussions of such

interweaving processes in as much as they redefine
psychoanalysis's relationship to Edgar Allan Poe; and the
consequences of such a redefinition.
In Freud's interest in language, speech and text we have seen a
constant desire to create a self-effacing language, one which is
transparent. This may be Freud's project but it is, of necessity,
opposed to Freud's practice. Freud needed metaphor to produce his
abstract structures. For this reason Freud's work is interspersed
with his various anxious interjections and interruptions. With Poe
it is that words are the reality of which they speak that causes his
anxiety, for Poe explicitly and Freud implicitly understand
language to have a vital interaction with the world that is filtered
through it both emblematically and symbolically. Thus, we must
again return to Poe's conception of words, of speech and of
textuality in order to set his desire for a totally absent meaning
embodied in a totally self-present language against Freud's desire
to find a totally present meaning which negates (in its presence) any
plenitude of the text. For Poe, as we shall see textual plenitude is
prior to the 'real', brings it into being and preconditions it. Whereas
Poe 'celebrates' the act of creation embodied in textuality, Freud's
attitude is one of 'anxiety' in the presence of his metapsychological
writings that depend so much upon the play of semantics within
the text. As Poe rationalises the grotesque, irrational, and unnatural
so Freud produces theoretical texts that 'irrationalise' the
preconceptions of commonsense rationality and thereby appears
(his detractors being quick to notice) to invoke a grotesque and
unnatural alien presence which underlies the' everyday' experience
and by so doing structures it through a rationalized grotesque.
Poe, like Freud, was especially conscious of the essential link
between reality and its embodiment in language. However,
whereas for Freud scientific terminology was a 'pure' metalanguage
(one to whose concepts the neurotic's fiction was anchored), for
Poe, reality itself is transmitted by and contained within the
transcendence of language. While both Poe and Freud admit the
indissoluble link between language and reality, reality for Freud is
the ultimate referent and arbitor (however it is filtered through
'sel£') as language is the ultimate reality for Poe, in whose stories
reality itself becomes a 'fiction'. In 'Berenice' Poe's narrator tells us
that, 'the realities of the world affected me as visions, and as visions
only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became, in turn-
not the material of my every day existence - but in very deed that
existence utterly and solely in itself.24 And this device is repeated
in 'The Assignation':
I could not help, however, repeatedly observing, through the

mingled tone of levity and solemnity with which he rapidly
descanted upon matters of little importance, a certain air of
trepidation - a degree of nervous unction in action and in speech-
an unquiet excitability of manner which appeared to me at all
times unaccountable, and upon some occasions even filled me
with alarm. Frequently, too, pausing in the middle of a sentence
whose commencement he had apparently forgotten, he seemed
to be listening in the deepest attention, as if either in momentary
expectation of a visitor, or to sounds which must have had
existence in his imagination alone. 25
In both his poems' Al Aaraaf' and 'Tamerlane' Poe spoke of the

creative power of words to which the created universe is especially
bound. 26 This facility of words is nowhere more apparent than in
'The Power of Words', a short tale in which angelic souls discuss the
animation of the universe. In answering the angelic form Oinos
about the specific nature of the 'impulses upon the air', Agathos
states that these impulses pervade everything as the 'medium of
creation', and that this medium of creation finds its occult essence
in words. 27 'And while I thus speak', says Agathos, 'did there not
cross your mind some thought of the physical power of words? Is not
every word an impulse on the air?'. He continues, 'this wild star- it
is now three centuries since with clasped hand, and with streaming
eye, ... I spoke it - with a few passionate sentences into birth.'28
Here Poe clearly refers back to the 'Logos' of 5t. John in its reduced
and specific form of the Word, one which unites reality to a divinely
present act of speech. The word, 'pregnant' with meaning, gives
'birth' to the cosmos.
Compared to Freud, Poe entertains a need for the indefinite
nature of language. Of music, which Poe felt the highest form of the
poetic sentiment, he comments, 'when music affects us to tears,
seemingly causeless, we weep not . .. from "excess of pleasure", but
through excess of an impatient, petulant sorrow that, as mere
mortals, we are as yet in no condition to banquet upon those
supernal ecstasies of which the music affords us merely a
suggestive and indefinite glimpse'.29 This indefiniteness is tied to
pain ('petulant sorrow') and it is through pain that Poe's tales

animate this indefiniteness, that, as it tends toward pleasure
('supernal ecstasies'), will create beauty. For Poe's theoretics only in
the indefinite (the playing out of an endless desire) can the sublime
find expression:
There are passages . . . which rivet a conviction I have long

entertained that the indefinite is an element in the true JWlTJOL~
Why do some persons fatique themselves in attempts to unravel
such phantasy-pieces as the 'Lady of Shallot'? As well unweave
the venteum textiless. If the author did not deliberately propose to
himself a suggestive indefiniteness of meaning, with the view of
bringing about a definiteness of vague and therefore spiritual
effect - thus, at least, arose from the silent analytical promptings
of that poetic genius which, in its supreme development
embodies all orders of intellectual capacity.3°
Only the 'genius', who transcends by his all-inclusive nature, 'all

orders of intellectual capacity' is able to invoke the paradoxical
reality in which 'indefiniteness of meaning' brings about a
'definiteness of vague and therefore spiritual effect'. Such a reversal
of expectation makes the text created by 'genius' transcendent in as
much as it relates to the spiritually divine. The divine Word is
beyond human understanding and is therefore definately vague; a
paradoxical and contradictory conclusion if it is not understood that
the genius as observer is he that simultaneously comprehends and
encompasses all the contradictions of the world. Thus, we
encounter 'Dupin', with his resolvent ability that unites the poet
and the prophet (he 'foresees' the solution of the puzzle) and the
Minister, an 'unprincipled genius'. Moreover, we find Poe, himself
as a persona: the presence of the analyst/observer-creator in 'The
Philosophy of Composition'. Here, Daniel Hoffman tells us, 'He
[Poe] is indeed ... a master-creator working out the details of his
preconceived plan ['The Raven']' observing himself in the act of
conceiving, choosing, shaping, succeeding ... because of this self
consciousness as artists: Makers, not merely finders. t3l Thus, the
'genius' for Poe transcends the order in his 'observation' by
bringing it into being. The 'genius' preserves his ironic pose (his
detachment) by indulging his divine subjectivity. He becomes thus
a reservoir and source of paradox.
Moreover, the genius does this by acting out his role as 'creator'
partaking of the divine spark of the godhead. Thus, Poe takes over
Coleridge's conception of imagination as that which allows the
mind of mortal creators the repe~ition of the 'eternal act of creation
in the infinate I AM'. That Poe saw the universe as a 'plot of God' is
no coincidence therefore, for Man and God are united through the
'primary imagination' a continual finite repetition of the 'Logos' of
St. John. 32 As Poe's romantic idealism completes itself in sublimity
so psychologies based upon the observation of neurosis label that
idealism with the bathetic concepts of materialist explanations.
What links God to man in Poe also links Poe to mental instability. The
'genius', of course, is able to unite these contradictory explanations
by his transcendence. The myth and ideology of Poe is then
completed and the two contradictions become complementary. In
what way then does the 'genius' create a story? Poe writes:
A poem is opposed to a work of science by having, for its

immediate object, pleasure, not truth; to romance, by having for its
object an indefinite instead of a definite pleasure, being a poem
only so far as this object is attained; romance presenting
perceptible images with definite, poetry with indefinite
sensations, to which end music is an essential, since the
comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception.
Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music
without the idea is simply music. 33
This indefiniteness of content, is contained in a determined and

definite structure, the form however is the 'idea' which of itself is
also properly the content. This indefiniteness pervades the content
of Poe's tales so that the form itself contains a specific contradiction
necessary to Poe's tales in sustaining their essential structural
tension. This paradox is contained in the idea of an absolutely
circumscribed form (the short tale) having the appearance of
open-endedness that stretches its content into infinity. In 'William
Wilson' Poe writes:
But the house! - how quaint an old building was this! - to some
how veritably a palace of enchantment! There was really no end
to its windings - to its incomprehensible subdivisions. It was
difficult, at any given time, to say with certainty upon which of its
two storeys one happened to be. From each room to every other
there were sure to be found three or four steps either in ascent or
descent. Then the lateral branches were innumerable -

inconceivable, and so returning in upon themselves, that our
most exact ideas in regard to the whole mansion were not very far
different from those which we pondered upon infinity.34
With its 'incomprehensible subdivisions' this circumscribed

'infinity' (the building itself) reflects Poe's theory of the short tale,
for 'it has always appeared to me [i.e. Poe] that a close circumspection
of space is absolutely necessary to the effect of insulated incident: -
it has the force of a frame to a picture. It has an indisputable moral
power ... and, of course, must not be confounded with mere unity
of place,.35
While space is circumscribed the mind is free to explore its limits
in Poe's tales, the picture is framed by the re-framing of the analyst,
who finds himself in the position of the narrator he follows, at the
centre of, and yet a witness to, a terrible psychological dilemma,
embodied in and resolvent upon himself. This explains the endless
desire for interpretation which Poe's short tales, in their absolute
stylistic circumscription, set in motion. It also explains why so
many critics misunderstand the tactic of Poe's circumlocution,
which is itself a stylistic device for 'widening' a text and keeping it
within extremely narrow boundaries. Hence, the text acts as a decoy
leading the analyst both toward his interpretation yet away from it,
in an endless attempt to both reveal and conceal the technique in
which its 'meaning'lies. We have seen this circumlocution in Poe's
'The Purloined Letter' and 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' where
much space is given over in the text to the elucidation of games. Poe
summarized this technique in another typical piece of
circumlocution 'The Imp of the Perverse' where he writes:
An appeal to one's own heart is, after all, the best reply to the
sophistry just noticed. No one who trustingly consults and
thoroughly questions his own soul, will be disposed to deny the
entire radicalness of the propensity in question. It is not more
incomprehensible than distinctive. There lives no man who at
some period has not been tormented, for example, by an earnest
desire to tantalise a listener by circumlocution. The speaker is
aware that he displeases; he has every intention to please; he is
usually curt, precise, and clear; the most laconic and luminous
language is struggling for utterance upon his tongue; it is only
with difficulty that he restrains himself from giving it flow; he
dreads and deprecates the anger of him whom he addresses; yet

the thought strikes him, by certain involutions and parentheses
this anger may be engendered. That single thought is enough.
The impulse increases to a wish, the wish to a desire, the desire to
an uncontrollable longing, and the longing (to the deep regret
and mortification of the speaker, and in defiance of all
consequences) is indulged. 36
Psychologically, in 'one's own heart', or at the centre of Poe's tale

about what lies in the heart is the desire to circumvent yet lead the
reader onto the meaning. 'Circumlocution' tantalizes yet leads the
reader away from the central mystery, whereas communication
should normally be 'curt, precise and clear' allowing such a
narrative directly to connect with facts at the heart. Such a narrative
would be ideal in so far as that narrative would totally absent itself
in the presence of its meaning. 'Luminous language' struggles for
utterance and yet the speaker or text veils that luminosity behind
'involutions and parentheses'. Instead of a progress toward
meaning the text retreats from it by enwrapping it deeper and
deeper within the body and technique of its style. While the writer
G. R. Thompson in his study of Poe's irony makes no attempt at an
analysis of the importance of circumlocution in Poe's style he does
grasp the ironic necessity of such a technique in such a tale. 37
We notice this in Poe's style if we return to the second paragraph
of Poe's 'The Man of the Crowd' to see one more instance, not
wholly obvious, of Poe's textual equivocation. We are told for
instance by the narrator that the keenness of his mood was now
restored from convalescence and sharpened to a fine instrument of
analysis, 'when the film from the mental vision departs ... and the
intellect, electrified, surpasses as greatly its everyday condition, as
does the vivid yet candid reason of Leibnitz the mad and flimsy
rhetoric of Gorgias'. 38 However, this statement can be read, not that
Leibnitz's candid reason surpasses Gorgia's rhetoric but that
Gorgia's rhetoric surpasses that of Leibnitz. The careful stylistic
tactic Poe has employed is to displace the qualifying verb
'surpasses' that would render the quotation unequivocal if it was
placed between the name Leibnitz and the words 'mad and flimsy'.
This is further brought out in Poe's essay 'Time and Space' when he
writes of 'that Leibnitz who was fond of interweaving even his
mathematical, with ethical speculations, making a medley rather to
be wondered at than understood,.39 G. R. Thompson writes:
Poe's vision of the perverse becomes codified in 'The Imp of the

Perverse' ... seemingly more an essay than a tale. It is another
dark comedy of errors which clearly spells out Poe's fundamental
conception that it is man's fate to act against his own best
interests. But the dissertation on perversity has its dramatic
irony, for the 'rationality' of the narrator merely enmeshes him
deeper in anxiety as he absurdly, helplessly, uses his imaginative
intellect to will his own destruction by means of a mere
whimsical thought. Having committed murder he reflects that he
is 'safe' - unless, of course, he be fool enough to confess. This
foolish fancy immediately seizes him and he rushes out to
confess his crime to passersby in the street. The recurrent
confessional structure of other of Poe's tales is operative here too,
for the narrator has apparently confessed to a priest in his cell the
night before his impending execution. In an attempt to explain
his obsession with the possibility that some 'imp' in the structure
of the universe has victimized him, the narrator succeeds in
convincing us not of his rationality but of his irrationality. The
long prologue in its 'circumlocution' does not directly make his
point but instead seems to obscure the more direct and succinct
conclusion. But the point of this circumlocutious inventiveness
becomes clear when the narrator finally reveals to us his anxiety
about his execution; his imagination immediately foresees
additional possibilities for perverse speculation: in death he will
be free of his physical chains and his cell- but what new torments
yet await him, he wonders, in what after life?40
Consequently, the sharpness and clearness of reason itself, and

the narrator's reason in particular, is put into question through
'mad and flimsy rhetoric'. William Carlos Williams writes of Edgar
Allan Poe that 'he has a habit, borrowed perhaps from algebra, of
balancing his sentences in the middle, or of reversing them in the
later clauses'.41 And it is this reversal that inscribes the laws of logic
within the schemes of madness. Moreover, it is in the nature of
Poe's rhetoric in this story (in its flimsiness) to continually pose the
possibility of seeing through its transparency while at the same
time the flimsy nature of the rhetoric will make the narrative
opaque and unreadable (and structurally 'solid' as narrative).
Donald Barlow Stauffer, whose study of Poe's style is extremely
interesting points out that by a complex use of parenthetical clauses
Poe combines motive and narrative so closely that the two are
mutually self-supporting, inter-dependent and inseparable:

motive is narrative. 42
Circumlocution, within Poe's narratives unweaves and reweaves
its mystery, forming a continual oscillation between a beginning
this is totally opaque (it creates a puzzle) and an ending that
appears transparent (it creates a resolution to that puzzle). 'Here',
says Pierre Macherey, 'is that double movement: the mystery must
be concealed before it is revealed. ,43 Yet, the very equivocation that
Poe sets up, not only in his tales but also in the balance of certain
sentences, means that the beginning is no more, nor any less
opaque than the end, and that the end itself may enwrap the story in
an enigma it never contained at its beginning, as in 'The Narrative
of A. Gordon Pym' where it is the editor 'Poe' who creates the
enigma of the final message on the rock. Indeed, opacity and
transparency constantly change places and equivocate over their
nature, so that 'books that do not permit themselves to be read'
allow precisely of a reading to prove the point. Circumlocution
brings the technique of the tale into careful prominence, whether it
be to do with the theme of 'play' in 'Berenice' or, 'games' in 'The
Purloined Letter' and 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue'. In 'The Imp
of the Perverse' the narrative acts as an example of the principle of
the 'perverse' while the principle of the perverse becomes itself the
very circumlocution from which the narrative arises.
In 'The Imp of the Perverse' the exact connotation of the neutral
disquisition on perversity is withheld until we come to the
beginning of the slender narrative that ends the piece. It is only
once we reach this that we realise that what appeared an objective
discourse on perversity delivered in a neutral and unnamed 'voice'
actually belongs to a murderer rationalizing the reason, not for his
act of murder, but for his 'desire' to confess. The narrator suddenly
addresses his reader, as if the reader were the unnamed interlocutor
that had animated the disquisition, not as Thompson suggests 'a
priest'. The narrative now becomes a dialogue in which
(perversely?) we only hear the answers:
I have said this much, that in some measure I may answer your
question - that I may explain to you why I am here - that I may
assign to you something that shall have at the least the faint
aspect of a cause for my wearing these fetters, and for my
tenanting this cell of the condemned. Had I not been thus prolix,
you might either have misunderstood me altogether, or with the
rabble, have fancied me mad. As it is, you will easily perceive that
I am one of the many uncounted victims of the Imp of the
Perverse. 44
Prolixity, the very circumlocution that appears to contradict

analytic discourse, (which in itself should be 'curt, precise and
clear'), becomes (by becoming a parody of analysis) a part of the
narrative it only appears to preface. Moreover, at the same time, the
narrative becomes an example of this psychological tendency.
Thus, in one direction the initial circumlocution seems parodic yet
in the other totally serious. The nature of this circumlocution
changes according to the direction in which we read it.
Circumlocution, (prolixity) become Poe's very narrative technique
in which the end is constantly delayed (through its referal to its
beginning) and hurried toward; in which the opening acts as
preface and preparation for the end.
Freud's analyses attempt to find the reality hidden or concealed
by the neurotic's words (the impulse of which is the mainspring of
narration - to indefinitely delay the ending). Freud works towards
that 'other' reality, as yet unrealized by the analysed text, which is
inside the text precisely because it is realizable outside the text in the
analytic situation: the interpretation and resolution of the analysis.
Poe works differently for it is the possibility that words
themselves create another 'more real' reality that fascinates him.
Words do not act as a decoy away from the actual crisis but point
inexorably toward it and in doing so bring it into being.
We have seen that unity of effect is the mark of a perfect plot. The
'denouement constantly in view' the poet strives to recreate the
'plot of God' within his tale. 'If his initial sentence tend not to the
outbringing of this effect, then he [the poet] has failed', says Poe, 'in
the whole composition there should be no word written, of which
the tendency ... is not to the one pre-established design'.45 Poe's
use of 'circumlocution' enwraps the tale in a constant delay of the
denouement and, yet, keeps to the totality of the 'design'. Its
movement away from any 'heart' to the tale nevertheless produces
that 'heart' within its prolixity. The ironic 'twist' at the end of the
tale becomes therefore the embodiment of the principle for which it
is the vehicle.
Of this principle which represents the undercurrent of the tale
Poe tells us, 'when the suggested meaning runs through the
obvious one in a very profound undercurrent so as never to
interfere with the upper one without our own volition, so as never
to show itself unless called to the surface, there only for the proper
uses of fictitious narrative, is it available at all,.46 In this Poe points
us to the fusion of manifest and latent levels. The latent level now
runs 'through' and is invoked by the vehicle of the manifest tale.
Thus, the two are inseparably linked. The level of signification is
contained within the level of the signifying chain as both signified
and signifier. Like Freud's 'Eternal City' one or other level may be
invoked and, yet, like Freud's metaphor both levels occupy the same
space and both resolve and revolve around a unifying principle and
a unifying narrator which are themselves interwoven as vehicle and
embodiment. Coleridge's 'primary imagination' is therefore, in
these tales, neither hidden nor veiled despite Poe's comments to the
contrary but quite openly displayed through the vehicle of the
surface tale. Indeed, the surface tale embodies this imagination at
work creating the special conditions for its own existence: a text
that will be generated by, embody and also generate this 'primary
imagination'. In so doing Poe's texts enwrap the primary signified
(that is Logos-Imagination) within the play of the tale's signifiers.
The universe of the tale becomes self contained in as much as the
'primary imagination' absents itself as the definite yet spiritual
vagueness the effect of which Poe desired in his tales. Such
conditions place the observer-analyst-reader at the centre of the
tale, as its creator and as its transcendent signified. The psyche of
genius like the psyche of God is, however, wrapped up within the
textual Word. To analyse such a world is to split word from psyche
and in so doing misconceive the disidereta that made Poe the
author he was.
6
Revelation, Primal Truth
and the Problem of Self-
Presence
The 'Id' and 'The Imp of the
Perverse'
This is the dream's navel, the spot where it reaches down into the
unknown.
Sigmund Freud The Interpretation of Dreams
And here only, ... the knot demanded the interposition of the
God.
Edgar Allan Poe, 'Eureka'
Narrative in Freud and Poe both describes a movement of analysis

yet seems to reinscribe that analysis with the subject matter each
author chooses. The end is 'deferred' at the moment it appears to
have been reached, 'the entire text', writes Derrida of Freud's
'Beyond the Pleasure Principle', 'has a diabolical movement, it
mimes walking, it walks without ceasing, but does not advance; it
regularly traces out one more step but does not allow the gain of an
inch of ground'. 1 The text, advancing toward its interpretation
through the reader who animates it, nevertheless, finds death
reinscribed within the circuit of the reader's desire- all remains the
same while it is absolutely changed - nothing has happened but
everything is different. 2 Death is inscribed within the syntax of the
work itself and reveals itself, if at all, at the final moment not as
finality, but as a confirmation of that stasis inherent in the text.
This circularity centres upon the narrator of the circuit and his
narrative quest for the grounding of that circuit outside the text and
recuperated as its meaning. We find here the ultimate rest for
84
Revelation, Primal Truth . .. 85
meaning, a set of intertextual interpretations that nevertheless are

sucked infinitely down into the 'secret' hole, the cavernous embrace
of the text, where the revelatory moment merely confirms the
non-movement of the narrative. The revelatory climax, therefore,
does nothing other than force the reader back into the text.
Revelation in Poe's tales is unexplained truth. In 'The Narrative of
A. Gordon Pym' the image of the whirlpool is invoked as the
mariners come before the figure of some type of unexplained
vision:
And now we rushed into the embraces of the cataract, where a

chasm threw itself open to receive us. But there arose in our
pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its
proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the
skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of snow. 3
This quest for meaning by the narrator, which of necessity catches

the reader, ends in the tale 'A Descent into the Maelstrom' with
another whirlpool acting like 'the mouth of [a] terrific funnel'.4 The
final moment of truth is also the moment of annihilation for, even
though the narrators survive, they learn nothing from their
experience. Such a moment is that of an all embracing and sucking
vacuum down which the text, with its narrator, rushes. The text
stops to reveal Truth as nothingness: the revelation of nothing at all.
It is along this funnel says Freud that reality rises but into which
truth flows away:
There is often a passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted

dream which has to be left obscure; this is because we become
aware during the work of interpretation that at that point there is
a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unravelled and
which moreover adds nothing to our knowledge of the contents
of the dream. This is the dream's navel, the spot where it reaches
down into the unknown. s
Endlessly the dream thoughts rise up and branch out opening up

interpretational play for the analyst. 6 Thus, J. Brander Matthews
describes Poe's own method of analytic detective narrative:
In the true detective story as Poe conceived it in 'The Murders in

the Rue Morgue', it is not in the mystery itself that the author
seeks to interest the reader, but rather in the successive steps

whereby his analytic observer is enabled to solve a problem that
might well be dismissed as beyond human elucidation.
Attention is centred on the unravelling of the tangled skein rather
than on the knot itself. The emotion aroused is not surprise, it is
recognition of the unsuspected capabilities of the human brain?
It is as if the Delphic oracle wraps and rewraps itself so that the

revealing of the central secret is always reinscribed within its
telling, part of the wrapping from which it emerges like the
'mycelium' of the mushroom or a 'mouth' that sucks in (rather than
speaks out); a mouth like a 'funnel'.8 torn aside, the veil reveals
only the graven words of a secret that refers back into itself and to its
own act of inscription. In 'The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym' we find
the words 'I have graven it within the hills, and my vengeance upon
the dust within the rock' proclaimed upon an island where 'nothing
white was to be found', betraying the fear of a page without writing,
where the page needs to be all black with inscription until,
signifying only to themselves, these Poe tales make infinitely
difficult the production of reading as meaning. 9 The graven images
themselves reside tantalizingly in caves, The analysis the editor
'Poe' gives to Arthur Pym's strange island signifies only the act
itself cutting off meaning in its final proclamation since, 'it is not
impossible, that "Tsalal", the appellation of the island of the
chasms, may be found, upon minute philological scrutiny, to betray
either some alliance with the chasms themselves, or some reference
to the Ethiopian characters so mysteriously written in their
windings. "I have graven it within the hills, and my vengeance
upon the dust within the rock." dO
In its circular path the narrative of the analytic circle redoubles
onto itself as an excursion back to itself through all the other voices
that appropriate it. Narrative appears in the interstices between
texts, to one side of the projected narrative we find as intended in
the text. This disrupts the text as a narrative toward meaning as
something other than another text and it is this that reinvokes its
literariness. This form of narrative creates of it a detour back to itself
but disrupted through its observer, 'the length of the detour is such
that it can no longer be mastered, the return being never assured
and the engagement ... impossible to untie or deny'Y The
tautological unity of the text that refers only to itself is momentarily
broken to find itself restored (and interrupted) in its reader's
interpretation.
R.evelation, Primal Truth . .. 87
The circularity invoked by this type of narrative opens a structure

that it infinitely closes off. This narrative circularity remakes life as
death, or as Jacques Derrida puts it, it becomes a form of life and
death equivocation. 12 The play of narrative possibility closes
narrative off in its infinity and gives it a finite structure. This closure
is produced by the narrator who opens up the 'life' of the text, but
functions as an emblem of death. Poe writes in 'The Assignation' of
the narrator-analyst, 'stupefied and aghast I had myself no power to
move from the upright position I had assumed upon hearing the
shriek, and must have presented to the eyes of the agitated group a
spectral and ominous appearance, as with pale countenance and
rigid limbs, I floated down among them in the funeral
gondola'. U
Roland Barthes comments, 'in the ideal sum of all the possible
utterances of language, the link of the first person "I" and the
attribute" dead" is precisely the one which is radically impossible:
it is this empty point, the blind spot of language which the story
comes, exactly to occupy. What is said is no other than this
impossibility'. 14
In 'The Man of the Crowd' the reader is presented with certain
rhetorical modes in which character is developed. He is presented
with the voice first of La Bruyere, whose epigram in French invites
the reader to join the characters in the story, 'ce grand malheur',
quotes Poe, 'de ne pouvoir etre seu!'. This misfortune is primarily
not the misfortune of the old man whom we are later to follow, but
of the reader whose function, if it is to function, cannot exist prior to
or without the text. Texts animate the reader's desire to animate
texts. If it is La Bruyere's epigram that is chosen to 'frame' the story,
the first paragraph opens without a voice, yet still speaks, 'it is well
said' opens the story.15 'It' begins the opening paragraph whose
effectively 'neutral' narrative tone, the objective voice of analysis,
will construct the narrative to follow around its insidious message.
'It' speaks for 'It' knows what 'was well said of a certain German
book'. 16 But 'It' says of this German book' [es ]lasst sich nicht lesen',
itself a quotation, an epigram; that very baldness which will give
the tale its richness and for the reader, its air of mystery. It is in this
paragraph that those that should speak, the men who die 'nightly in
their beds', do not and that those who have eyes to see and ears to
hear (their confessors) are bound not only to secrecy but themselves
have no existence being 'ghostly'. I? The beginning of 'The Man of
the Crowd' has no voice. Though it speaks no one is there to say the
words.
Who then is involved in the story? 'Not long ago', opens the next
paragraph, 'I sat at the large bay window of the 0- Coffee House in
London. dB The third person opening of the story then opens the tale
for the narrative of T (for he has no other name), of a subject alone in
a coffee-house. It is the T who will now take up the burden of the
analytic voice and take us on the analytic narrative journey. But this
T is already spoken by the 'It' of the opening paragraph, an
opening paragraph whose speaker is 'no one'. This first and third
person pronoun confusion is, says Rosemary Jackson, one of the
properties of fantasy. 19 More than that, however, it destabilizes the
relationship of the reader to the character through whom the reader
will experience the tale. What happens when a reader is referred by
a text to someone called T who is underwritten by no one? What
then is this initial animating principle toward which Poe's
narrators quest, from which Freud's dreams rise, and how is this
daemonic animating principle re-enwrapped within the textuality
which generates it? What relationship does 'it' have to 'es' and 'id'?
* * *
To discuss the question posed it is necessary to reconsider both

Freud and Poe's mythology of the initial creation of organic life. For
Poe such an initial moment is one in which the total self-present
godhead is split into innumerable 'thinking' particles of which Man
is the prime example. Poe tells us that, 'the unparticled matter,
permeating and impelling all things, is God. Its activity is the spirit
of God - which creates. Man, and other thinking beings, are
individualizations of the unparticled matter'.2D
Similarly in 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle', the initial (non-
sentient) particle is 'forced' into animation. 'Shall we follow',
invites Freud, 'the hint given us by the poet-philosopher, and
venture upon the hypothesis that living substance at the time of its
coming to life was tom apart into small particles, which have ever
since endeavoured to reunite through the sexual instincts?'21 To
which we can compare Poe's thesis that 'this has been effected by
forcing the originally and therefore normally aile into the abnormal
condition of Many'Y Through the image of the splitting of the
initial particles these two myths of origin make available the
possibility of a comparative and figurative language which is full of
meaning only when robbed of a unified self-presence. The
Revelation, Primal Truth ... 89
technique of the text then becomes a device for delaying the

ultimate union of matter, the self-presence of the object of analysis
(the text to itself and the possibility of a self present author). Of this
Poe says, talking of the diffused particles of the Universe, itself the
perfect plot or text, that:
In such arrangement, under such conditions, we most easily and

immediately comprehend the subsequent most feasible carrying
out to completion of any such design as that which I have
suggested - the design of variety out of unity - diversity out of
sameness - heterogenei ty out of homogenei ty - complexi ty out of
simplicity - in a word, the utmost possible multiplicity of relation
out of the emphatically irrelative One. 23
Out of a lost and specific original unity and meaning the plenitude
of the text is created. In the same way Freud's original inanimate
object becomes a 'living substance' in a 'multicellular condition'
with its 'meaning' now 'transferred' and delayed to the 'highly
concentrated' (overdetermined?) form of the 'germ-cells'. These
germ cells correspond in this instance to the words and clauses of
the text, the residue of 'immortal' parts once the body of the text has
been disrupted. Of this movement Freud says that, 'these instincts,
in which the chemical affinity of inanimate matter persisted,
gradually succeeded ... to form a protective cortical layer ... these
splintered fragments of living substance in this way attained a
multicellular condition and finally transferred the instinct for
reuniting, in the most highly concentrated form, to the
germ-cells,.24
Here, self-presence is a denial of the very relationships in which
meaning appears. The 'protective layer' is complete and
fragmented, its very unified protective layer allowing for an
interpretation of its fragments and their relationship.
By his cosmology Poe sought to exclude others. But, for Poe, it is
only through others that man can re-unite the fragments of the
godhead and aspire to the divine. Having emptied his cosmos of its
content, from the primary cause to the annihilation of matter which
returns to the primary cause, Poe's text empties itself of its subject:
the unification of matter and its annihilation.
Furthermore, we have seen how, given this 'emptying out' (and
uniting) process both Freud and Poe can move toward the area of
pure speculation, itself an attempt to open out that which is without
content. This movement, toward speculation for its own sake forces
both Freud and Poe to find speculation as a primal textual
proposition: form without content. Thus, paradoxically,
speculations finds a content in itself as itself, 'we cannot, then', says
Poe, 'regard the microscopical works of the animalculae in
question, as simple nothings; for they produce, as I say, a positive
effect, and no multiplicity of zeros will result in unity - but as
negative quantities - as less than nothings; since - into - will give
+'.25 Thus two negative terms yield a positive conclusion through
their relationship.
However, speculation may find its content outside itself in the
demand made by the analysing text to unify its fragmentary form
within the figure of the author as he is himself 'fictionalised by his
text, as he appears as a speculation of his text: a character'.
Where the text stops at its author there is found a type of stasis or
death to its reading; a closing over of desire. In the same way the
finding of the 'author' as a subjugated 'body' has ended in the
author falling silent beneath the weight of his appropriating
discourse. It is the special feature of Poe's theoretics that desire
never closes over, for to do so produces annihilation, silence and
death. In this case the acquisition of self-knowledge is death. In 'the
Power of Words' the dialogue runs:
Oinos: 'But in this existence, I dreamed that I should be at once

cognizant of all things, and thus at once happy in being
cognizant of all'.
Agathos: 'Ah, not in knowledge is happiness, but in the
acquisition of knowledge! In for ever knowing, we are
blessed; but to know all were the curse of a fiend'.
Oinos: 'But does not The Most High Know All?'

Agathos: 'That (since he is The Most Happy) must be still the one
thing unknown even to HIM'.26
Poe's universe in its recovery of itself finds death as that which is

revelation by total annihilation. Hence, for God to know all, to
know the essence of his being as God would be to know the one
thing that would bring total self-presence and at that instant total
non-presence (for God would be in a relationship with nothing
else). Silence personifies the loss of self at the point of total
acquisition of self. An apocalyptic silence descends in 'AI Aaraaf':
Ours is a world of words: Quiet we call

'Silence' - which is the merest word of all.
All Nature speaks, and ev'n ideal things
Flap shadowy sounds from visionary wings -
But ah! not so when, thus, in realms on high
The eternal voice of God is passing by.
And the red winds are withering in the skyY
Silence is the emblem and the indicator of the final primal object
of pursuit: the self-present 'self'. However, the primary cause, for
which this absolute silence stands in proxy, remains hidden, inside
the individual, yet alien, as a form of destiny:
In the consideration of the faculties and impulses - of the prima

mobilia of the human soul, the phrenologists have failed to make
room for a propensity which, although obviously existing as a
radical, primitive, irreducible sentiment, has been equally
overlooked by all the moralists who have preceded them. In the
pure arrogance of the reason, we have all overlooked it. We have
suffered its existence to escape our senses solely through want of
belief- of faith; - whether it be faith in Revelation, or faith in the
Kabbala. The idea of it has never occurred to us, simply because
of its supererogation. We saw no need of impulse - for the
propensity. We could not perceive its necessity. We could not
understand, that is to say, we could not have understood, had the
notion of this primum mobile ever obtruded itself; - we could not
have understood in what manner it might be made to further the
objects of humanity, either temporal or eternal. 28
This internal necessitating principle is wrongly posited, so the

tale 'The Imp of the Perverse' tells us, as a form of external destiny
for 'the intellectual or logical man, rather than the understanding or
observant man, set himself to imagine designs - to dictate purposes
to God. Having thus fathomed, to his satisfaction, the intentions of
Jehovah, out of these intentions he built his innumerable systems
of mind'.29 However, working backward toward the primal cause
provides an explanation for the mistaking of the design of the deity,
Poe writes:
It would have been wiser, it would have been safer, to classify (if
classify we must) upon the basis of what man usually or
occasionally did, and was always occasionally doing, rather than

upon the basis of what we took it for granted the Deity intended
him to do. If we cannot comprehend God in his visible works,
how then in his inconceivable thoughts, that call the works into
being? If we cannot understand him in his objective creatures,
how then in his substantive moods and phases of creation?
Induction, a posteriori, would have brought phrenology to admit,
as an innate and primitive principle of human action, a
paradoxical something, which we may call perverseness, for want
of a more characteristic term. In the sense I intend, it is, in fact, a
mobile without motive, not motivirt. Through its promptings we
act without comprehensible object; or, if this shall be understood
as a contradiction in terms, we may so far modify the proposition
as to say, that through its promptings we act, for the reason that
we should not. Nor will this overwhelming tendency to do wrong
for the wrong's sake, admit of analysis, or resolution into ulterior
elements. It is a radical, a primitive impulse - elementary.3o
The 'Imp of the Perverse' is the motivating primal cause, a factor

that impels us back to our isolation by first causing us to act against
the interests of all other organisms and thus create ourselves as
unique and solitary in our crime. This is the inhuman, non-human
alien content that Freud imparts to human action. Freud's 'id', is that
unknown, yet known factor which dominates our lives and from
which our guilt is generated via the superego, in that it is from the
'id' that undifferentiated desire is formed. This desire, in its greed
for itself alone is the destructive impulse that makes the organism
antagonistic to all other organisms and destructive toward them.
Their hostility is then directed against the organism whose
aggression is, via these others, turned against itself, so that in its
death it finds its own will.
The id as an 'it' or inferred primary content is known only when
coloured by the secondary matter as in the tale of 'The Imp of the
Perverse'; a blind automatism. Freud's 'id' corresponds, (itself it
stands as a name for nothing, with a location unreachable), to the
con tentless centre of the human psyche. It becomes, like the
daemonic Imp of the Perverse, a hollow or drain, which sucks in
'meaning' endlessly to replace it by 'affect' (a secondary material
centre). Poe's universe is contentless and hollow in its centre just as
the mechanics of 'The Imp of the Perverse' are silent. In a similar
way Freud's 'id' is submerged, yet itself swamps the major part of
the psyche's functions.
The truth is not a centre but a 'hollow' or drain, an empty though

unifying and structuring first principle. For that reason truth is an
absence of centrality and is a phenomena of the periphery (a
relational phenomena). Hence, the truth is the 'dead-centre' of the
text as the T is the 'dead-centre' of the subject. 31 As both terms are
posited as existing through or from the position of the other they
shift with the subject/other relationship. They do not get cancelled
however, for their position is required in the equation of
subject/other or text/text. But, now they are no longer central or
positive, because they are peripheral and 'valueless'. They are
posited in absence but tacitly acknowledged; not posited as
absences which are necessary limits, but products of absence,
difference and distancing.
Samuel Weber has noted in connection with the dream that it is
exactly the tangled net of the dream's navel (its point of meaning)
that in its supplementary capacity will lead us to the essence of the
dream content. This navel is both above, central to and to one side
of, the dream itself and it is the 'split' that animates the 'core' or
origination of the dream itself.32 Yet, it is precisely at this navel that
truth 'flows' away so that the climax of analysis is the point that
signification becomes hollow, uncomfortable, refuses to speak.
Freud tells us:
There is often a passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted

dream which has to be left obscure, this is because we become
aware during the work of interpretation that at that point there is
a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unravelled and
which moreover adds nothing to our knowledge of the contents
of the dream. This is the dream's navel, the spot where it reaches
down into the unknown. 33
This is the point that meaning becomes primary, silent and

invisible, as Poe says with regard to the divine Omphallic Knot:
That the principle at issue is strictly spiritual - lies in a recess

impervious to our present understanding - lies involved in a
consideration of what now - in our human state - is not to be
considered - in a consideration of Spirit in itself. I feel, in a word,
that here the God has interposed, and here only, because here
and here only the knot demanded the interposition of the God?4
The process of these primary causes is mediated through their

secondary and more material functions. These secondary functions

continually reveal yet veil, are produced by yet productive of the
primary causes, each function being permeated with each other.
This leads Jacques Derrida to write of the unconscious that:
In this context and under this heading the unconscious is not, as

we know, a hidden, virtual and potential self-presence. It is
differed - which no doubt means it is woven out of differences,
but also that it sends out, that it delegates representatives or
proxies; but there is no chance that the mandating subject 'exists'
somewhere that it is present or is 'itself', and still less chance that
it will become conscious. In this sense, contrary to the terms of an
old debate ... the 'unconscious' can no more be classed a 'thing'
than anything else, it is no more a thing than an implicit or
masked consciousness. 35
Reading this paragraph one is struck by the apparent contradiction

of the unconscious at once being 'no more a thing' yet able at the
same time to 'send(s) out ... representatives or proxies'. Derrida's
'no doubt' which follows his calling the unconscious 'it' ('it is
differed') marks an anxious hesitancy which seems to draw Derrida
to the implicit conclusion that 'the' unconscious is incapable of
being comprehended through language. Octave Mannoni makes
the same point when he writes, 'the unconscious too easily appears
to be a thing we speak of, while actually it speaks in its own specific
way and with its specific syntax,.3D The unconscious is then already
alien to the subject in that it 'speaks' before the subject and causes
the subject to write 'of' it, even while it elludes conceptualization.
For Mannoni the unconscious lies outside the comprehensible
intellect, for it always preceeds it. Yet, the unconscious has a form of
language, a structure within language. This is the contradiction that
Mannoni falls into: that the unconscious while not being a 'thing' is
capable of being structured, rather than being a vacuum. It is, as if,
as in Poe's 'Dream-Land', the unconscious were situated,
'from a wild weird clime that lieth sublime,

Out of SPACE - out of TIME'.37
And at the centre of the unconscious is 'id', both contained by and

containing the unconscious.
Freud names the 'id' precisely as Poe names the Imp of the
Perverse to place the unnamable; the empty space in which a

contentless drive operates. The destructive drive in both Freud and
Poe is centred here around this unnamable centre. It impels Poe's
dying victims in 'The Man of the Crowd' to remain silent, it impels
Freud's clients to come to him, and for him to name the tabooed
daemonic motivation. The unconscious speaks with the voice of an
otherness which the analyst is able to name as 'daemonic'.
In as much as they speak of the daemonic both 'Beyond the
Pleasure Principle' and 'Eureka' talk of the return to total
self-possession, but this brings, through the primary function, a
catastrophic reawakening of the daemonic itself, as the alien
presence which motivates the two texts. Philip Rieff writes of this
moral dilemma:
Unspecified self reproach returns unaltered with every return of

the repressed. Here Freud stumbled upon what he considered the
prime variety of human sickness: our insistence upon making
something specific of this contentless sense of guilt.
The prime human sickness, guilt in its pristine emptiness,
seeking a content, was nothing with which Freud could wrestle-
more precisely, the Nothing with which he wrestled. Of guilt as
nothing specific, Freud could give no accounts except mythic, ...
stories of 'primal' crime after crime, each set in the fondation of
morality and society. Every time Freud approached the 'pure
sense of guilt' with the reproach of his theory, it disappeared
behind the content supplied by his therapeutic myth of the first
figure of authority. That content referred to an original figure of
authority entirely despotic and amoral.
Every revolt of Self against Self limitation invites punishment as
the form of its relation to Not-Self. It was for this reason that
Freud equated 'need for punishment' with 'pure sense of guilt'.
The apparent lack of content in guilt is the punishment that
anticipates the crime of Self, willing against Not-Self.-~/!
Thus, the unspoken, the ultimate prime and pristine cause becomes
in Rieff's text a form of guilt that splits the individual or the text as
they attempt to break the bands of self-limitation. Fragmenting the
self, this absolute other 'Not-Self' limits and directs the self.
The question that then remains to be answered is what
relationship does this 'lost' and originating structural cause have to
the textual structure that represents it and produces it? Freud's
concern with Oedipus, reflected as it is by Poe's own interest will

lead us next to consider the function of, and relationship between
text, psyche and structure and to the complex question of Freud and
Poe's relationship to knowledge and culture.
7
Synthesis and Archetypes
The Reinscribed 'Lost' Origin;
Oedipus and Textual Possession; the
Production and Reproduction of Text
through Psyche and Psyche through
Text; the Encyclopaedic Mind
This monogram is a triangular pyramid; and as in geometry, the

solidity of every polyhedral body may be computed by dividing
the body into pyramids, the pyramid is thus considered as the
base or essence of every polyhedran. The author then, after his
own fashion, may mean to imply that his book is the basis of all
solidity or wisdom - or perhaps, since the polyhedron is not only
a solid but a solid terminated by plane faces, that the Doctor is the
very essence of all that spurious wisdom which will terminate in
just nothing at all - in a hoax, and a consequent multiplicity of
blank visages. The wit and humour of the Doctor have seldom
been equaled.
Edgar Allan Poe 'Marginalia'
In a fundamental way Freud's theories are based upon sexuality.

However, such sexual theory as is to be found in Freud has been far
too often tied to consequent attempts to anchor it in biological data.
Freud's sexual theories are valid, if valid at all, in as much as they
deal not with biological realities but with phantasies or projections
of a supposed sexuality assumed to exist both by himself and his
patients. Freud's sexual theories are primarily concerned with
setting a series of relationships in an order that has a certain logical
and significant sense (in as much as they are, like all theories,
self-contained and exclusive) and in recognizing that sense as
existing not in bodily function but between mental or psychological
processes. Freud's sexuality is literally of the mind. The phantasy
97
then becomes fantastic because ungroundable empirically, rather it

is a projection of an un channelled desire. That Freud's triangle may
or may not be considered 'true' as objective fact is irrelevant when
one can see that this triangular relationship has efficacy as theory to
explain certain mental structures that mayor may not display
themselves blatantly in the 'tics' of physical distress brought about
by a repression (one that is unsuccessful of course). Freud's
observations are based on things going wrong in the system, for if
the 'Oedipal crisis' is successfully surmounted it remains hidden.
How then does Freud's 'mythology' of the hidden structure work
when it encounters the mystery of the origin of text, in a sexually
related way? In what does the 'self' articulate and recognize its own
quest for origins through the text which it generates. Which, as we
will see, itself reproduces that generating self as a sexual part of the
text? Is the text author of the self or self author of the text?
In Freud's science we are made aware of the distance between the
desire of the analyst and the object itself; in Poe we are made aware
of their similarity: the self in relation to the self. Both approaches
open a gap which constantly attempts to close over and around
certain characters, figures and scenes. Freud breaks off from
metaphor precisely where he becomes most metaphoric. 'Beyond
the Pleasure Principle' in its psychical, biological and
embryological descriptions becomes thus an extended and complex
metaphor for the life of the instincts and the dynamics of the
pleasure principle.
It is noteworthy that at the two most crucial points in Freud's
analysis of that which lies beyond the pleasure principle he turns
first to an anecdote and then to a myth. The anecdote of his
grandson'S game provides a starting point for an intuition that will
finally hinge upon a conclusion confirmed in a mythology:
What I have in mind is, of course, the theory which Plato put into
the mouth of Aristophanes in the Symposium, and which deals
not only with the origin of the sexual instinct but also with the
most important of its variations in relation to its object. 'The
original human nature was not like the present, but different. In
the first place, the sexes were originally three in number, not two
as they are now; there was man, woman, and the union of the two
... '. Everything about these primaeval men was double; they
had four hands and four feet, two faces, two privy parts, and so
on. Eventually Zeus decided to cut these men in two, 'like a
The Encyclopaedic Mind 99
sorb-apple which is halved for pickling'. After the division had

been made, 'the two parts of man, each desiring his other half,
came together, and threw their arms about one another eager to
grow into one'.1
'Only through an appeal to mythology' as Jean Laplanche says in

Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, can 'Eros, the force that maintains
narcissistic unity and uniqueness ... be deducted as a return to a
prior state:2 Furthermore, this 'appeal to mythology' is, at the
moment it claims a universality, apparently dangerously selective.
Percival Bailey, an opponent of Freudianism writes of the other
great Greek myth of origin Freud chose to use, that 'the Oedipus
myth is not the only instance where Freud chose from material
available to him that version which fitted into his preconceived
ideas'.3 From this, Jacques Derrida argues Freud formulates rules.*
Freud's ultimate referal to Oedipus would seem, therefore, to
have invalidated psychoanalytic grounding from the beginning.
The concept of Oedipus as a theoretical grounding rests in its
availability as the specific transcendent signified and ultimate
arbitor of a system in which it consists of being only a signifier.
Removed from the system in which it functions Oedipus's use as
transcendent invalidates its applicability as a universal. Thus,
Oedipus as a part which produces a theoretical whole is an example
of the Freudian use of synecdoche as Sophocles's Oedipus and
Freud's Oedipus become parts of a functioning whole in which all
the versions of the Oedipal story interact, 'thus a complete myth is
held to be made up of all its versions and a structural analysis
should, as a consequence, bear this out. According to Levi-Strauss,
Freud's discovery of the Oedipus complex is to be considered
simply as another version of Oedipus myth'.5 Yet, these objections
specifically miss the relationship that Sophocles's play embodies
between the analyst, the object of his analysis, the act of analysis
and the means of analysis, even though it may be true that Freud
gives more priority to one end of this analytic circle than may have
been necessary.
However, for any theoretical base to function it must be regarded
as a particular and specific referent both before and after the event
to which it is affixed as a structural necessity. Only if Freud's
Oedipus is considered as a referent that is itself produced from
what it refers to, rather than a mere reduced ultimate cause a priori
to the event, can Oedipus function usefully in an open system or
textual mesh. The continual closure of his system around Oedipus

forced Freud into a necessary impasse upon which he constructed
(retrospectively - as Oedipus comes late), psychoanalytic theory.
Oedipus is the 'poetic' hero of the psychoanalytic drama itself or,
more properly, the name for a scene without actors. Why does this
absence become distinct?
Jacques Derrida has argued, in discussing Lacan's 'Seminar on
"The Purloined Letter" " that this rule consists in the necessity of
psychoanalysis to drive toward finding the ultimate meaning of
meaning, the hidden object veiled behind the secondary processes,
revealed in its pristine form behind the psychoanalytic metaphors
which nevertheless distance the original idea from its symptoms. 6
Freud's numerous examples can be represented by his comments:
'What made it (Hans's) a neurosis was one thing alone: the
replacement of his father by a horse.'7 Moreover, 'a sympton is a
sign of, and a substitute for, an instinctual satisfaction which has
remained in abeyance,.8 'Replacement' and substitution are the
instruments of a structure which functions through neurosis.
Behind Oedipus as symptom and its empty structure, (empty
because it contains the removable and significant truth which
leaves it empty), stands the Phallus as it underwrites the Oedipal
scene and for which the Oedipal scene stands in proxy,
representing the relinquishing of direct satisfaction and the birth of
desire. 9 This is, in part, the logical consequence of a system based
upon masculine phantasies of penis-loss, an act of observation by a
male child which takes on a retrospective and symbolic role. More
relevantly, however, the Phallus appears when the mind projects
upon one part of the body a prohibition and then, in the mind, that
bodily part becomes tabooed, secret - 'sacred' within the psyche's
structure. The Phallus acts within the psyche to produce the
dominant relational model. For the moment I leave problems of the
Phallus to which we will have to return when we consider the
'phallic-female muse'. Rather let me note that in guarding this
removed signifier Derrida accuses psychoanalysis of missing the
essential 'literary' aspect of texts. lO The exemplary model for
applied psychoanalysis, that is literature, has escaped its enclosing
moment. I I Nevertheless, in reality such a moment is recuperated,
but in a very different way to that which Jacques Derrida is willing
to grant, even following his own formula of the 'already written'.
Freud finds the Phallus (the term his work generates but does not
conceptualize) through his search for the Oedipal situation. Before
returning to the problems inherent in the concept of the Phallus and

its relevance in phantasy let us consider the character within whom
this crisis is embodied. One nineteenth-century commentator
wrote of Poe:
Induction, and a microscopic power of analysis, seem to be the

pervading characteristics of the mind of Edgar Poe. Put him on
any trail, and he traces it as keenly as a Blackfoot or Ojibway: give
him any clue, and he unravels the whole web of mystery: never
was bloodhound more sagacious in scenting out a murderer; no
Oedipus himself more shrewd in solving an enigmaY
Moreover, in 'Thou art the Man' the narrator tells us, 'I will now play
the Oedipus to the ... enigma.'13
From the author as Oedipus, we move to the narrator and then, in
'Eleonora' the reader himself 'plays' Oedipus to the narrator's
sphinx:
We will say, then, that I am mad. I grant, at least, that these are two
distinct conditions of my mental existence - the condition of
lucid reason, not to be disputed, and belonging to the memory of
events forming the first epoch of my life - and a condition of
shadow and doubt, appertaining to the present, and to the
recollection of what constitutes the second great era of my being.
Therefore, what I shall tell of the earlier period believe; and to
what I may relate of the later time, give only such credit as my
seem due; or doubt it altogether; or, if doubt it ye cannot, then
play unto its riddle the Oedipus. 14
But is Poe's Oedipus that of Freud? Surely the equation of Freudian

Oedipus and Poe-esque Oedipus would be fallacious? This we
must concede if we decide to equate the two. However, if we see
how the two confront, condition and mirror each other different
results are possible from those in which we might, for example,
rashly equate Poe's triangles with Freud's.
Certainly both authors take their version of the myth from
Sophocles, certainly the interest aroused by Oedipal mystery was
current in Freud's uncle, Jacob Bernays's time (he having written
about it) and, therefore, was a possible topic in Poe's day also. This
may be so, it may not. Indeed, Poe seems to use the term with a
certain amount of laxity, whereas Freud uses the term forcefully.
One must concede that this is so but Poe's invocation of the name
and the contemporary reviewer's recognition of the appositeness of
the appellation reveal Poe's concern with unravelling (and creating)
enigmas, enigmas specifically to do with origin. In relationship to
the texts he writes and their relationship to the psyches thus
involved Poe's Oedipus is the same as Freud's yet the same in a
radically different way from our possible expectations. Poe's
Oedipus confronts Freud's and does not merely become subsumed
in Freud's version, but highlights the relationship of desire with
knowledge that operates in both the work of Freud and Poe.
Oedipus finds the answer to his quest for self by the 'accident' of
going beyond self. Poe's concept of Oedipus goes beyond itself and
finds itself answered by Freud's concept of Oedipus only so that
Freud's concept can find (beyond itself), an explanation of its own
function through Poe's invocation. The relationship thus set up
always contains this duality of perspective, in which the Oedipal
question put by the reader to the text echoes from the text through
the reader who becomes a participant as he observes the processes
which structure his relationship with the text.
Thus, from the active and creative author, through the narrator
who suffers (and who analyses) to the 'passive' (yet powerful)
reader, Oedipus continues to operate as that which holds the
answer to its own question. The riddle to the 'psychology' of the tale
is firmly held within the textuality of the text itself offering itself up
to a reader whose reading, because it holds the answer to a question
it does not realize it has put, is again referred back to the text that
animates it. Consequently, to find the ultimate removed signified
psychoanalysis must encounter Poe who re-animates the question
of origins to which the Oedipal encounter is attached.
* * *
Freud's analysis, as we have seen, takes on the peculiar form of an

interpretative synthesis. The patient's history structures yet is
reproduced through the present symptoms which themselves
animate the history to which they are attached. Freud begins with
the most obvious source of the neurosis affecting his patients, one,
moreover, which would in itself appear to answer for the symptoms
developed. In this Freud concerns himself with a consistent theory
of an originating structure, one which eludes his grasp until his
formulation of the Oedipal struggle. He begins with a rational

explanation, firmly fixed in the biographical and 'real' history of his
patients. Of one he writes:
Here, then, was the unhappy story of this proud girl with her
longing for love. Unreconciled to her fate, embittered by the
failure of all her little schemes for re-establishing the family's
former glories, with those she loved dead or gone away or
estranged, unready to take refuge in the love of some unknown
man - she, had lived for eighteen months in almost complete
seclusion, with nothing to occupy her but the care of her mother
and her own pains. 15
Where most commonsense explanations would stop Freud finds

something 'more' than cannot be accounted for. Economic failure,
lack of love, drudgery, loneliness; these only partially explain the
peculiarity of the patient's sad life. All these do not satisfy Freud for
they do not specifically explain the form of the physical nor of the
mental pain that the patient manifests.
These appear in the 'spastic' symptoms of the patient, breaking
through the patient's intentions as a kind of 'gap' or haemorrhage
in which the patient is temporarily 'absent' from herself. The
removal of these 'absences' provides the impetus for Freud's
therapeutic method. The closing of this 'gap' provides the patient
with 'reality'. Of another patient Freud notes the spastic 'tics' that
mark the neurosis:
And her speech was from time to time subject to spastic

interruptions amounting to a stammer.... What she told me was
perfectly coherent and revealed an unusual degree of education
and intelligence. This made it seem all the more strange when
every two or three minutes she suddenly broke off, contorted her
face into an expression of horror and disgust, stretched out her
hand towards me ... and exclaimed, in a changed voice, changed
with anxiety: 'Keep still! - Don't say anything! - Don't touch
me!d6
No amount of drudgery, loneliness or lack of love thought Freud

could account in any intelligent person for so violently and
daemonically expressed 'tics'. In the treatment of another patient
Freud comments:
But what shall we say of the purely medical interest of this tale of
suffering, of its relations to her painful locomotor weakness, and
of the chances of an explanation and cure afforded by our
knowledge of these psychical traumas? ... As far as the physician
was concerned, the patient's confession was at first sight a great
disappointment. It was a case history made up of commonplace
emotional upheavals, and there was nothing about it to explain
why it was particularly from hysteria that she fell ill or why her
hysteria took the particular form of abasia. 17
Here again the commonplace leads to the 'alien' and unnatural

which themselves point away from the generality of experience
toward the 'particular' which Freud wishes to explain. Thus,
Freud's question centres on a primary cause (the causal necessity
behind the hysteria and its 'abasial' form), activated and motivated
by a number of reasonably obvious manifest motives. Freud's
search for the causation that will exactly accord both with 'our
knowledge of these psychical traumas' and the actual form it took in
the patient requires Freud to offer a theoretical explanation that,
supplementary to the seemingly manifest causes, will become, in
fact, central to and transcendent of the other causes, acting unseen
to place all the other facts in order:
It has also struck me that amongst all the intimate information

given me by the patient there was a complete absence of the
sexual element, which is, after all, more liable than any other to
provide occasion for traumas. It is impossible that her excitations
in this field can have left no traces whatever; what I was allowed
to hear was no doubt an editia in usum Oelphini of her life story ...
when, however, I reflect on the reserve with which she told me
under hypnosis about her maid's little adventure in the hotel, I
cannot help suspecting that this woman who was so passionate
and so capable of strong feelings had not won her victory over her
sexual needs without severe struggles, and that at times her
attempts at suppressing this most powerful of all instincts had
exposed her to severe mental exhaustion. 18
Radical censorship and displacement lead Freud to consider hidden

causations, ones only recognisable through explanation. If
recognition altered the symptoms (so Freud thought) then such
explanation as produced that change could be considered somehow
'true'. Elsewhere he writes of this 'hidden' structuring:
As we see, both forms of the Oedipus complex, the normal, active

form and the inverted one, come to grief through the castration
complex. The Russian boy's anxiety, idea of being devoured by a
wolf contained, it is true, no suggestion of castration, for the oral
regression it had undergone had removed it too far from the
phallic stage. But the analysis of his dream rendered further proof
superfluous. It was a triumph of repression that the form in
which his phobia was expressed should no longer have
contained any allusion to castration. 19
Explanation of particular symptoms gives way to theoretical

designations underlying and totally hidden behind the symptoms
of the patient. That, theoretically, the changing of symptoms by
recognition of an explanation is invalid goes without saying.
Explanations have efficacy but have no particular relationship to
'truth'; they merely alter the phantasy patterns. Each explanation
still begs the question of an origin (one that structures the
explanation). The concept of Oedipus performs this structuring
function. But what structures Oedipus?
Freud's growing dissatisfaction with the 'simple' answers of his
patients, went with a widening awareness of both over-
determination and transference. However, at the same time a certain
consistency in the fundamental regions of each person's
psychological background began to provide a theoretical bedrock to
his other theories. As we have seen this theoretical bedrock moves
through 'individual' sexuality toward cosmic procreation and in so
doing further enwraps Freud's speculations in discussion of myth
and literature, until speculation itself becomes, in 'Beyond the
Pleasure Principle', a literary, dramatic and 'mythological'
investigation of its own process of self-creation.
This begins to become apparent in the case history known as
'Dora' and especially in the 'explanation' of Dora's second dream. It
will be Freud's explanation of the process whereby Dora has her
second dream rather than the dream itself upon which we shall
focus attention. Having retold the dream Dora's explanation is
found by Freud to be incomplete and unsatisfactory. He begins to
interpret:
At this point a certain suspicion of mine [Freud's] became a

certainty. The use of 'Bahnhof' ('station'; literally, 'railway-court')
and' Friedhof' ('cemetery'; literally, 'peace-court') to represent the
female genitals was striking enough in itself, but it also served to
direct my awakened curiosity to the similarly formed 'Vorhof'

(,vestibulum'; literally, 'fore-court') - an anatomical term for a
particular region of the female genitals. This might have been no
more than mistaken ingenuity. But now, with the addition of
'nymphs' visible in the background of a 'thick wood', no further
doubts could be entertained. Here was a symbolic geography of
sex! 'Nymphae', as is known to physicians though not to laymen
(and even by the former the term is not commonly used), is the
name given to the labia minora, which lie at the background of
the 'thick wood' of the pubic hair. But anyone who employed
such technical names as 'vestibulum' and 'nymphae' must have
derived his knowledge from books, and not from popular ones
either, but from anatomical text-books or from an
encyclopaedia. 2o
A 'suspicion' for Freud leads to a 'certainty' when the etymology of

each element of the dream (each major word uttered by the patient in
her description of the picture in the dream) is deciphered. Each term
related to a 'station', a 'cemetary' and a 'vestibule' finds its corollary
in sexuality and the complexity of the dream is dispelled in favour
of an initial and simple 'geography' of sexuality. This 'symbolic'
landscape awaits its viewer and its reader. By a careful glance the
'exposed' nature of the dream's sexuality offers itself up. In this way
the sexual lies exposed and overdetermining the particular
elements of the dream, just like the 'letter-map' game in Poe's 'The
Purloined Letter'.
And, hence, by a rapid 'mental gyration on his heel' Freud
conforms to Poe's dictum to 'abandon' particulars and accomplish
an overall view so that, 'we need so rapid a revolution of all things
about the central point of sight that, while the minimal vanish
altogether, even the more conspicuous objects become blended
together'Y
The allegorical meaning of the dream's symbolism abolishes each
dream-term and translates them not only from the visual into the
auditory, but from the auditory into the written case history. Dora's
dream is an allegorical figuration of sexuality itself, a geography (of
'station', 'thick wood', 'vestibule' and 'cemetary') at once
anthropomorphized into 'pubic hair' and 'labia'. Thus, a geography
and a psychological form emerge. Yet, both these are enwrapped
within the 'technical' vocabulary of an 'encyclopaedia'. Thus,
Dora's dream engages Freud at the level of knowledge associated
with dictionaries and encyclopaedias and returns directly to those

very terms in its explanation. Freud makes the beginning of a
diagnosis, 'if this interpretation is correct, therefore, there lay
concealed behind the first situation in the dream a phantasy of
defloration, the phantasy of a man seeking to force an entrance into
the female genitals,.22
It is as if the defloration was precisely at the level of a language at
once declarative of and, yet, concealing a demonstration of sexual
compliance by Dora herself. Freud puts this very point to Dora:
I informed Dora of the conclusions I had reached. The impression

made upon her must have been forcible, for there immediately
appeared a piece of the dream which had been forgotten: she went
calmly to her room, and began reading a big book that lay on her
writing-table. The emphasis here was upon the two details
'calmly' and 'big' in connection with 'book'. I asked whether the
book was in encyclopaedic format, and she said it was. Now
children never read about forbidden subjects in an encyclopaedia
calmly. They do it in fear and trembling, with an uneasy look over
their shoulders to see if some one may not be coming. Parents are
very much in the way .... But this uncomfortable situation had
been radically improved, thanks to the dream's power of fulfilling
wishes. 23
At Freud's declaration of Dora's sexuality, Dora offers up another

part of the dream, until then concealed, which seems to confirm
Freud's comments. The 'big-book' is again an 'encyclopaedia'.
Dora's description of her dream, narrated around a railway station,
and a painting of 'nymphs' leads Freud on a literary quest for a
particular book. The encyclopaedia declares itself through the
technically correct terms Dora has recalled from her furtive
childhood reading. With the theory of wish-fulfilment in place the
pattern of the encyclopaedia emerges at the centre of Freud's search
for the ultimate repository of knowledge, the emblem of the human
psyche: a repository where past and present are found alongside
each other, where associative ideas of all sorts are stored and where
the signifier unfolds alphabetically in a metonymic slide from
words collated under' A' to those found under 'Z':
At first she would not remember ever having read anything in an

encyclopaedia; but she then admitted that a recollection of an
occasion of the kind did occur to her, though it was of an innocent

enough nature. At the time when the aunt she was so fond of had
been so seriously ill and it had already been settled that Dora was
to go to Vienna, a letter had come from another uncle, to say that
they could not go to Vienna, as a boy of his, a cousin of Dora's
therefore, had fallen dangerously ill with appendicitis. Dora had
thereupon looked up in the encyclopaedia to see what the
symptoms of appendicitis were. From what she had then read she
still recollected the characteristic localization of the abdominal
pain. 24
Dora finds sexuality by looking up 'appendicitus', and the 'letter'

both of uncle and of book begins to 'inhabit' her psyche without her
conscious awareness. Taking hold of the physical symptoms the
psychological idea possesses Dora in the form of a letter which
arrives with news of appendicitus. However, its true content is,
nevertheless, concealed as it has not yet declared its meaning even
on its being read, 'Dora had therefore given herself an illness which
she had read up about in the encyclopaedia, and she had punished
herself for dipping into its pages.'25 This becomes the onset of her
neurosis, and finds its final destination in the myth (not yet
formulated) of Oedipus with his 'impotence' (and lack of
self-knowledge) physically symbolized by his club foot:
I naturally required a special determinant for this. Dora objected

that she would anyhow have had to go upstairs if she had wanted
to get to her flat, which was on an upper floor. It was easy to brush
aside this objection (which was probably not very seriously
intended) by pointing out that if she had been able to travel in her
dream from the unknown town to Vienna without making a
railway journey she ought also to have beeen able to leave out a
flight of stairs. She then proceeded to relate that after the
appendicitis she had not been able to walk properly and had
dragged her right foot. This state of things had continued for a
long time, and on that account she had been particularly glad to
avoid stairs. Even now her foot sometimes dragged. The doctors
whom she had consulted at her father's desire had been very
much astonished at this most unusual after-effect of an
appendicitis, especially as the abdominal pains had not recurred
and did not in any way accompany the dragging of the
foot.26
Oedipus is declared within a text, whose letter robs the holder

and inscribes her within the neurotic circle. Dora goes to the
encyclopaedia to find one type of knowledge and another possesses
her. She becomes an allegorical figure in Freud's text, the emblem of
her own enigma, structured by her relationship to a myth, that is
spelt out via forbidden pages read by 'children ... in fear and
trembling'. Like Oedipus Dora punishes herself ('she had punished
herself) for being the solution to her own riddle and she does this
via the encyclopaedia - appendicitus becoming a punishment for
other things she reads about. The foundation of Dora's second
dream watched by the observer-analyst Freud oscillates between
sexuality as the underpinning of knowledge and knowledge as the
underpinning of sexuality, between dream and text, geography and
psychology, the visual and the literary, the past (the dream-
contents) and the future (the dream-thoughts).
Finally all these symptoms end in a 'phantasy of childbirth'.27 Of
course this is precisely a phantasy for the birth of meaning in Dora's
case history depends upon Dora's realization - through Freud (he is
not in a position to theorize it) - of her subjection to Oedipus and
the agency of an undeclared 'letter'. Meanwhile, Freud's text
rearranges itself around the theme of a knowledge which forever
conceals itself and finds its reader in he who looks elsewhere.
Freud's analysis of Dora's second dream firmly anchors it in a text
created to encapsulate all forms of knowledge: Encyclopaedic
knowledge, the encyclopaedia as the essential book of knowledge is
the textual emblem of that which Dora understands but cannot
articulate. 28 Dora's dream, as it is plotted by Freud, becomes a text,
itself crossed by an indeterminate number of discourses and modes
of experience, the final one of which happens to be sexual and also
happens to reside in a text. Yet, it allows for one other final
assumption, that Freud's own method of re-solution is itself
encyclopaedic in that it is able to recognize and play upon each level
of meaning.
* * *
For Poe encyclopaedic knowledge is reserved for the ultimate text:
the created universe. And, yet, for Poe the universe is only a vast
expansion of individual will. Although the will continues to create
in a finite way the infinite and perfect plots of God it forgets that it
too is God and it forgets its own special relationship and relevance
to the reproduction of the text through the mechanisms of its

psyche and the special conditions of its plot. Poe tells us that:
The pleasure which we derive from any display of human

ingenuity is in the ratio of the approach to this species of
reciprocity. In the construction of plot, for example, in fictitious
literature, we should aim at so arranging the incidents that we
shall not be able to determine, of anyone of them, whether it
depends from anyone other or upholds it. In this sense, of course,
perfection of plot is really, or practically, unattainable ... but only
because it is a finite intelligence that constructs. The plots of God
are perfect. The Universe is a plot of God. 29
'Eureka' presents the universe as the ultimate primal text whose

'core' or plot is itself perfect. The universe, constructed by its
sublime author contains, as earthly plots only strive to do, all the
possible languages, styles, modes and cultures that are available to
it. Throughout Poe's work he continually enwraps his tales within
this totality of cultural and aesthetic availability. 'The Purloined
Letter' begins with the two protagonists looking for a 'missed' book
in a 'library,.3D But it is his tales 'Ligeia' and 'The Assignation' that
Poe tried to encapsulate all culture within their ideal boundaries. In
'Ligeia' we will see how her immense learning covers every aspect
of knowledge for her narrator who is both her husband and
worshipper: 31
I have spoken of the learning of Ligeia: it was immense - such as I

have never known in woman. In the classical tongues was she
deeply proficient, and as far as my own acquaintance extended in
regard to the modem dialects of Europe, I have never known her
at fault. Indeed upon any theme of the most admired, because
simply the most obtruse of the boasted erudition of the academy,
have I ever found Ligeia at fault? How singularly - how
thrillingly, this one point in the nature of my wife has forced
itself, at this late period only, upon my attention! I said her
knowledge was such as I have never known in women - but
where breathes the man who has traversed, and successfully, all
the wide areas of moral, physical and mathematical science? I saw
not then what I now clearly perceive, that the acquisitions of
Ligeia were gigantic, were astounding. 32
Her encyclopaedic mind gives way to a description of a fantastic

chamber (a death-rebirth chamber) in which the narrator terrifies

the Lady Rowena: 33
Yet although the external abbey, with its verdant decay ...
suffered but little alteration, I gave way, with a childlike
perversity . .. to a display of more than regal magnificence
within .... Alas, I feel how much even of incipient madness
might have been discovered in the gorgeous and fantastic
draperies, in the solemn carvings of Egypt, in the wild cornices
and furniture, in the Bedlam patterns of the carpets of tufted gold!
... Let me speak of that one chamber.... Here there was no
system, no keeping, in the fantastic display, to take hold upon the
memory .... Occupying the whole southern face of the pentagon
was the sole window - an immense sheet of unbroken glass from
Venice .... The ceiling, of gloomy-looking oak was excessively
lofty, vaulted, and elaborately fretted with the wildest and most
grotesque specimens of a semi-gothic, semi-druidical device.
From out the most central recess of this melancholy vaulting,
depended, by a single chain of gold with long links, a huge
censer. . .. Saracenic in pattern. . .. Some few ottomans and
golden candelabra, of Eastern figure were in various stations
about ... the bridal couch - of an Indian model. ... In each of the
angles of the chamber stood on end a gigantic sarcophagus of
black granite, from the tombs of the kings over against Luxor,
with their aged lids full of immemorial sculpture. But in the
drapery of the apartment lay, alas! the chief phantasy of all .... It
was spotted all over, at irregular intervals, with arabesque
figures .... But these figures partook of the true character ...
which belong to the superstition of the Norman, or arise in the
guilty slumbers of the monk. 34
The abbey itself outwardly decaying (the mind in disintegration?),

nevertheless contains within its walls a 'display of more than real
magnificence'. This 'more than' is significant for it reminds us of the
containing of the 'fabulous' within the bounds of a possible reality.
The fabulous is contained in the absorption of historical cultures
and forms, in the 'draperies', 'carvings of Egypt', 'in the wild
cornices and furniture' and 'in the Bedlam patterns of the carpet'.
Unlike the encyclopaedia the chamber appears to have no order in
its eclecticism. However, the whole description moves in a certain
order, from 'window' to 'ceiling' and thence to a 'censer' and
'candelabra'. The description itself moves from the 'fantastic
draperies' and returns finally, through all these images, to 'the

drapery of the apartment' and the 'guilty slumbers of the monk'.
Dreams and sexuality again appear through a history of art and of
culture from 'Egypt', 'Venice', 'the eastern', 'Saracenic', and the
'Indian', through the styles of the 'semi-Gothic', 'semi-druidical' to
the 'Norman' and through a description of the furniture in the room
(a geography?) which moves toward 'a gigantic sarcophagus of
black granite' and the 'sexual' arabesques of the tapestry veiling the
'naked' walls. Among all this is placed 'the bridal couch'.
In 'The Assignation' this cultural assimilation is taken to further
extremes. The narrator tells us that:
Shortly after sunrise, I found myself accordingly at his Palazzo,

one of those huge structures of gloomy, yet fantastic pomp, which
tower above the waters of the Grand Canal in the vicinity of the
Rialto. I was shown up a broad winding staircase of mosaics, into
an apartment whose unparalleled splendour burst through the
opening door with an actual glare, making me blind and dizzy
with luxuriousness.
I knew my acquaintance to be wealthy. Report had spoken of his
possessions in terms which I had even ventured to call terms of
ridiculous exaggeration. But as I gazed about me, I could not
bring myself to believe that the wealth of any subject in Europe
could have supplied the princely magnificence which burned
and blazed around.
In the architecture and embellishments of the chamber, the
evident design had been to dazzle and astound. Little attention
had been paid to the decora of what is technically called keeping,
or to the properties of nationality. The eye wandered from object
to object, and rested upon none - neither the grotesques of the
Greek painters, nor the sculptures of the best Italian days, nor the
huge carvings of untutored Egypt. Rich draperies in every part of
the room trembled to the vibration of low, melancholy music,
whose origin was not to be discovered. The senses were
oppressed by mingled and conflicting perfumes, reeking up from
strange convolute censers, together with multitudinous flaring
and flickering tongues of emerald and violet fire. The rays of the
newly risen sun pouring in upon the whole, through windows
formed each of a single pane of crimson-tinted glass. Glancing to
and fro, in a thousand reflections, from curtains which rolled
from their cornices like cataracts of molten silver, the beams of
natural glory mingled at length fitfully with the artificial light,

and lay weltering in subdued masses upon a carpet of rich,
liquid-looking cloth of Chili gold. 35
In 'The Fall of the House of Usher' this eclecticism is fulfilled in a

library:
Our books - the books which, for years, had formed no small
portion of the mental existence of the invalid - were, as might be
supposed, in strict character of phantasm. We pored together
over such works as the Ve vert et Chartreuse of Gresset; the
Belphegor of Machiavelli; the Heaven and Hell of Sweden borg;
the Subterranean Voyage of Nicholas Klimm by Holberg; the
Chiromancy of Robert Flud, of Jean D'Indagine and of De la
Chambre; the Journey into the Blue Distance of Tieck; and the
City of the Sun of Campanella. One favourite volume was a small
octavo edition of the Directorium Inquisitorum, by the Dominican
Eymeric de Gironne; and there were passages in Pomponius
Mela, about the old African Satyrs and Egipans, over which
Usher would sit dreaming for hours. His chief delight, however,
was found in the perusal of an exceedingly rare and curious book
in quarto Gothic - the manual of a forgotten church - the Vigiliae
Mortuorum secondum Chorum Ecclesiae Maguntinae. 36
However, at the moment Poe invokes this catalogue of learning

he nullifies it: the majority of the titles are works invented by Poe and
given by him as 'gifts' to these other authors. Thus, 'The Fall of the
House of Usher' becomes itself a fictitious storehouse, a library of
'fictional' classics, a list that ends in a book of services for the dead.
Poe's library ends in the mirror image of a real library with books
that 'do not permit themselves to be read' simply because they do
not exist. Moreover, such a collection leads to the antithesis of
reading: the existence of a dead letter. This dead letter which
pervades the story is concerned with Usher's psychology. The
'thing' which invades Usher's psyche is his relationship to the
femininity of his sister. Usher's library is Usher's psyche is Usher's
sister is Usher himself.
Consequently, as far as Poe could, he made his texts all inclusive
and this he did particularly through a creative expansiveness of
language itself, one which would so enclose and absorb culture in
its totality and its history that these texts would appear the very
telos, the very apothesis and gathering in of the entire culture that
led up to thern, containing in thernselves as an essential 'essence' or
quintessential rneaning all that had been or could be in the future,
produced as a text. At the end of a history of textual production the
Poe style would hold the quintessence, the prirnal substance of
narrative and plot, returning thereby the history of fictional
writings to its origins; hence it would recreate the rnovernent, the
teleology of the 'plot' of the cosrnos which in its end returns to its
beginning. A new pre-Babel rnyth is inherent in Poe's outlook.
In 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' an exploration of each
possible language is undertaken to find the one unique language
the rnurderer speaks:
'That was the evidence itself', said Dupin, 'but it was not the
peculiarity of the evidence. You have observed nothing
distinctive. Yet there was sornething to be observed. The
witnesses, as you rernark, agreed about the gruff voice; they were
here unanirnous. But in regard to the shrill voice, the peculiarity
is - not that they disagreed - but that, while an Italian, an
Englishrnan, a Spaniard, a Hollander, and a Frenchman
atternpted to describe it, each one spoke of it as that of a foreigner.
Each is sure that it was not the voice of an individual of any nation
with whose language he is conversant - but the converse. The
Frenchrnan supposes it the voice of a Spaniard, and 'rnight have
distinguished sorne words had he been acquainted with the
Spanish'. The Dutchrnan rnaintains it to have been that of a
Frenchrnan; but we find it stated that 'not understanding French
this witness was exarnined through an interpreter'. The
Englishrnan thinks it the voice of a German, and 'does not
understand Gerrnan'. The Spaniard 'is sure' that it was that of an
Englishrnan, but 'judges by the intonation' altogether, 'as he has
no knowledge of the English'. The Italian believes it the voice of a
Russian, but 'has never conversed with a native of Russia'. A
second Frenchrnan differs, rnoreover, with the first, and is
positive that the voice was that of an Italian, but, not being
cognisant of that tongue, is, like the Spaniard, convinced by the
intonation'. Now, how strangely unusual rnust that voice have
really been, about which such testirnony as this could have been
elicited! - in whose tones, even, denizens of the five great
divisions of Europe could recognise nothing farniliar! You will
say that it rnight have been the voice of an Asiatic - of an African.
Neither Asiatics nor Africans abound in Paris; but, without

denying the inference, I will now merely call your attention to
three points. The voice is termed by one witness 'harsh rather
than shrill'. It is represented by two others to have been 'quick
and unequal'. No words-no sounds resembling words-were by
any witness mentioned as distinguishable'.37
Particularities defeat each interpretor, for unlike Dupin they are

unable to perform that 'gyration of the heel' that will allow an
overview of all possibilities. As each interpretor finds the voice's
'location' (its tonal quality) the text travels through the total possible
languages of the 'five great divisions of Europe'. The search for
meaning (the murderer's identity) defeats itself by invoking the
whole range of the 'divisions' of civilized western speech.
Communications break down (no one understands the language
spoken by an ape whose utterance is the negation of speech) via a
narrative that defines a specific genre built around interpretation
and identification (the detective tale). The murderer's voice becomes
equivalent to each language yet remains unique for it cancels
interpretation. The unequalness of its tone is preserved through its
equivalence to known modes of language, unifying the areas of
search and underlying them. In this way the murderer's 'voice', in
its equivalence, becomes an 'ironic' Ur-sprache, a negative foil
through which the text invokes all language. Poe's tales (even here
in their eclecticism) become themselves a type of Ur-Sprache that
conditions other texts and attempts to appropriate them in a
universal language and plot that would mirror that of the original
undivided cosmos. George Steiner says that:
The metaphor goes something like this: the Universe is a great

Book; each material and mental phenomenon in it carries
meaning. The world is an immense alphabet. Physical reality, the
facts of history, whatever men have created, are, as it were,
syllables of a perpetual message. We are surrounded by a
limitless network of significance, whose every thread carries a
pulse of being and connects ultimately to ... the Aleph.38
In returning to this primal' Aleph', the cosmos becomes a 'novel

Universe' whose plot we continually, but imperfectly, re-invoke
each time we write. In Poe's writing the very act of writing is
inscribed within a continuum of other texts, of outre texts, obscure
texts and singular texts and of cross-referencing. It continually

returns us not only to books that '[es]lasstnicht sich lesen' but to the
encyclopaedic mind or the library shelf. 'During a rainy afternoon',
Poe writes (this time of himself rather self flatteringly),' 'being in a
mood too listless for continuous study, I sought relief from ennui in
dipping here and there, at random, among the volumes of my
library- no very large one, certainly, but sufficiently miscellaneous;
and, I flatter myself, not a little recherche. 39 George Steiner
continues:
From the point of view of the writer, 'the universe which others
call the library', has several notable features. It embraces all books,
not only those that have already been written, but every page of
every tome that will be written in the future and, which matters
more, that could conceivably be written. . .. The linguistic
speculations of the Kabbala and of Jacob Boehme, that a secret
primal speech, an Ur-sprache from before Babel, underties the
multitude of human tongues. 40
'Eureka' is the reading and creation of that text, the attempt by a

part of God to comprehend the essence of his creation;
paradoxically an attempt by one individual to comprehend
something of which he is both absolute authorial creator and
component product. But the universe, retreating, withdrawing
from the author-god who created it returns to haunt that author and
manipulate him as he tries to assimilate it into the idealisation of
his own image.
Victor Tausk, through his investigation of the fantastic
'schizophrenic influencing machine' has shown how the author
finds himself shadowed and persecuted by the projection of his
own idealised persona (the text as a universe that he creates).41 But
Tausk left it to R. D. Laing and Harold Bloom to recognize that the
self is not split into a dichotomy but in being split fragments into a
multitude of different voices, voices of influential precursors from
the cultural history out of which, and to which, the new text
attempts to act as a telos. 42
Poe's text, like that of Freud, problematizes the internal and the
external. Poe's 'cosmic' text gives a 'telos' to all other texts just as it
stands as the essential grounding for them. It absorbs all other texts
as they work toward it. Freud's 'undifferentiated vesicule', the
initial organism, absorbs and motivates all other forms (more
animate and extended) until finally it reunites with itself at the end
of the life cycleY
* * *
While 'fictional' devices are built into the fabric of the
psychoanalytic text Freud considered his narratives as complex
representations of reality. He produces his work, in contrast to the
fictionalist, as 'natural, neutral and realistic'. In attempting to avoid,
as much as possible, the limitations of writing Freud uses language
as a direct link to the complexity of reality which fictionalists miss.
As such Freud's narrative is embedded in the pursuit of a rhetoric of
naturalism. He writes:
I must now turn to consider a further complication to which I

should certainly give no space if I were a man of letters engaged
upon the creation of a mental state like this for a short story,
instead of being a medical man engaged upon its direction. The
element to which I must now allude can only serve to obscure and
efface the outlines of the fine poetic conflict which we have been
able to ascribe to Dora. This element would rightly fall a sacrifice
to the censorship of a writer, for he, after all, simplifies and
abstracts when he appears in the character of a psychologist. But
in the world of reality, which I am trying to depict here, a
complication of motives, an accumulation and conjunction of
mental activities - in a word, overdetermination - is the rule. 44
While Freud takes pains to distance himself from' a man of letters

engaged upon the creation of a mental state', nevertheless we have
seen how his case history of Dora's treatment is increasingly
wrapped in textuality and problems of 'literary' interpretation.
Freud tries to counter the 'censorships' of creative writing (Dora's
psyche as a 'text') in order to avoid effacing the 'poetic conflict'
which she both embodies and suffers under. Thus, Freud is
'engaged upon the recreation' of Dora's 'mental state' by attempting
to 'depict' its overdeterminations. In so doing, Freud re-engages her
symptoms, through interpretative devices, in order to re-write them
without the obscurations of creative censorship.
To regain the 'world of reality' Freud is forced to circumvent the
reality that the patient actually narrates. Freud begins to re-write
the patient's history. This means initially that where censorship
existed in order to 'simplify and abstract' in the patient's creative

text of 'poetic conflict' Freud must bring back complexity and
overdetermination and through those a fundamental reality. The
simplicity of the text hides a complex though paradoxically singular
meaning (the 'rule' of overdetermination), by whose application
'meaning' is generated. Nevertheless, we have already seen how
Freud repossesses Dora's 'hidden' story through a return to the
repository of knowledge: the encyclopaedia. Therein lies, 'already
written', the symbolic truth hidden in her statements; the sexual
knowledge she attempts to hide (equivocally for she reveals it) is
clearly manifested on the pages of another text.
At the very centre ('the navel') of interpretation, at which point
the fiction is translated into its meaning, Freud's analysis meets an
obstacle beyond which he cannot proceed. Freud writes in another
case study, 'but the essence and the secret of the whole work lies in
an incestuous relation between a brother and sister. And here our
thread breaks off short'.45 In the 'essence' the 'secret' of the whole
work stops short the act of interpretation as it flows away into the
internal haemorrhage of 'incest'.
In Edgar Allan Poe's texts this split in the text is continually
reunited with the materiality of its production, so that the
perceptual shift which animates the search for the signified is
curtailed in its {re)possession by the animating text. If we tum to
Poe's comments on allegory we shall see this. He writes:
In defence of allegory ... there is scarely one respectable word to

be said .... One thing is clear, that if allegory ever establishes a
fact, it is by dint of overturning a fiction. Where the suggested
meaning runs through the obvious one in a very profound
undercurrent so as never to interfere with the upper one without
our own volition, as is never to show itself unless called to the
surface, there only for the proper uses of fictitious narrative is it
available at all. Under the best circumstances, it must always
interfere with that unity of effect which to the artist, is worth all
the allegory in the world. Its vital injury, however, is rendered to
the most vitally important point in fiction - that of earnestness or
verisimilitude. 46
For Poe, 'verisimilitude' or 'earnestness', that truth to the essence

of the text, is possible only when a continual oscillation is set up
between primary and secondary causes. This synthesis rejoins the
beginning to the end and re-emphasises the materiality of the text

itself. Both primary and secondary causes are then animated at
exactly the same time. 'Here', Poe tells us, 'the poem may be said to
have its beginning - at the end, where all works of art should
begin'Y
When the ... surface of the Earth, having undergone that

purification which alone could efface its rectangular obscenities,
should clothe itself anew in the verdure and the mountain slopes
and the smiling waters of Paradise and be rendered at length a fit
dwelling-place for man: - for Man the Death-purged-for man
whose now exalted intellect there should be the poison of
knowledge no more - for the redeemed regenerated, blissful: and
now immortal, but still for the material [my italics] man. 48
Poe's interest, artistically and philosophically, in the process of

reinscribing the ideal in the material provides the removed signified
with its chain of signification and thus the unconscious processes
(of either psyche or text) become for Poe (ironically) 'a symptom of
the conscious'.49
It is a theme which shows quite clearly the realization of the
removed signified as it is produced and productive of the chain
from which it has temporarily detached itself. This 'author'
becomes generated by and generative of his tale:
One feels that in the actual composition of his [Poe's] tales there
must have been for him, as they embody it in fact, a fascination
other than the topical one. The impulse that made him write them
that made him enjoy writing them - cannot have been the puerile
one of amazement, but a deeper, logical enjoyment, in keeping
with his own seriousness: it is that of PROVING, even the most
preposterous of his inventions plausible - that BY HIS METHOD
he makes them WORK. They go: they prove him potent, they
confirm his thought. And by the very extreme of their play, by so
much the more do they hold up the actuality of that which he
concei ves. 50
This 'potency' returns the Oedipal situation to its place within

the chain of circular appropriation within and between texts.
Hence, the Oedipal knot finds its importance in intertextuality
through its providing a space for the (re)production of a textually
produced author who is both controller of and controlled by his

text. But it is not possible merely to return to an authorial figure
without pursuing our inquiry further.
* * *
Freud encountered his own daemonic Muse in the figure of Dora
whose dream-phantasy, returns Freud's analysis directly to the
storehouse of knowledge (and a type of technical-sexual language)
in the encyclopaedia, from which and returning to which Freud
animates his analysis and dictates a formal 'meaning' to the
patient's neurotic behaviour.
In Poe's tales, it is Ligeia with her 'immense' learning, such as the
narrator had 'never known in women', who is the special 'daemon'
of language and knowledge, for not only is she' deeply proficient' in
the 'classical tongues' but also, 'as far as [the narrator's]
acquaintance extended in regard to the modern dialects of Europe,
[he has] never known her at fault,.51 Ligeia's learning is far beyond
that of ordinary men: 'where breathes the man', asks the narrator,
'who has traversed, and successfully, all the wide areas of moral
physical and mathematical science?' Her knowledge is, in the end,
the sum of all knowledge, 'the acquisitions of Ligeia were gigantic,
were astounding'.52 For the narrator Ligeia is a daemonic cultural
encyclopaedia in whom all things are contained.
Her complete proficiency in all forms of knowledge makes her
stand in the story as the total force of assimilated knowledge and
culture. She is a representative of Babel and like Babel she is
doomed. The violent metempsychosis undergone through the
hapless body of Rowena, visits itself upon the reader as the return
of the monstrous repressed of culture: undifferentiated knowledge.
Only by the death of the purely secular and 'unmotherly' wife
Rowena can the primal wife and 'mother' (she is textually the
narrator's mother) the daemon be reborn, rescued from her death
by a return through the very narrative techniques which created her
death. 53
Here, then, we must return to Oedipus. We asked what
structured the Oedipal quest and in what way through these
various texts is that structuring articulated. By placing Poe's texts in
a certain relationship with those of Freud we can see that the
juxtaposition has produced certain results. Let me try to summarize
this chapter and bring the threads together.
I began by arguing that Freud's concept of sexuality is that of a
sexuality inherent in the system of the mind, one that conditions

rather than is conditioned by the body. I continued by asking about
the quest for self that is found in texts whose resolution relies upon
a narrator or an interpreting and observing reader. How does the
psyche of the reader become caught up in the 'textuality' of the text
being read and what explanation of such a relationship would be
forthcoming if the text talks about origins and sexuality?
Through such questions I proposed that the Oedipal quest is
itself put into place by a transcendent term: the Phallus, a
mythologized bodily part taken up by the psyche and projected as
'sacred', tabooed and imparting a 'secret' knowledge. The Phallus, I
suggested was a 'physical' representation of a prohibition operating
in the structure.
Leaving the concept of the Phallus at this point I turned to Poe's
invocation of Oedipus, an Oedipus who is narrator, reader and
participant all at once, a character who basically stands for the scene
of an enigma: what is the ultimate conditioning factor of a secret, the
secret of the origin of knowledge? Where does such a knowledge of
knowledge originate and how is that knowledge, a knowledge of
self and the origin of knowledge connected with sexuality?
Dora's quest for self-knowledge is revealed by her mirror image
(Freud-the-analyst) to be both sexual and textual. In explaining
Dora's neurosis Freud develops his own knowledge of the structure
of the self to find out how a certain text invades Dora's psyche to be
projected later in a bodily malfunction. By so doing Dora becomes
for Freud an encyclopaedia of sexual knowledge: a textual body.
From such a body Freud makes his reading, (his diagnosis) and
thereby finds his theory generated. The text that Dora reads is the
text that Freud recovers. Dora's dream reveals to Freud the origin of
a certain sexual knowledge while Dora finds herself, through Freud,
represented in a book (actually Freud's text and the encyclopaedia).
Each part of Dora's dream-text becomes converted into a symbolic
mapping of sexuality. Freud finds the psyche which becomes
sexualized through a reading of it as text; a text in which the origins
of knowledge are carefully stored and catalogued. An
encyclopaedia, the end product of man's quest for rational
procedure reveals the 'irrational' origin of the quest: from whence
does the self originate?
Poe's ultimate text is not the encyclopaedic mind but the
encyclopaedic universe. But Poe's universe is mind and Poe's
universe is self struggling to find self. As Poe's textual aim is to
reproduce in finite form the mind of the universe so Poe's texts
assimilate as much cultural history as possible. However, these

texts reveal only the state of the universal mind. Moreover, this
mind is itself sexualized in its relation to the 'feminine' to which
each text ultimately returns. For Poe, knowledge of self and,
therefore, of the secrets of the universe and also the secret of the
origins of knowledge resides within the eyes of daemonic and
doomed female figures. Both Poe and Freud find their quest for an
ultimate referent beyond the process of signifier and signified held
as a secret by a woman.
This .woman is herself capable of causing dissemination through
what she teaches and at the same time also capable of absorbing it.
Each time the quest for self breaks off in the presence of a woman. It
is to 'woman' that both Poe and Freud must go for their originating
moment but each time this woman refuses to divulge her secret
prohibiting the furtherance of their quest. Instead, she invades and
directs the male quest as an alien presence which dominates the
male and finally is sacrificed to the male via explication as narrative
and narrative as explication. Each time the quest returns to the
narrator or the reader's self; a quest that is conducted through
external objects returns inward. These muses become phallic by
returning the question of origins to the self. They at one inspire the
quest for self and represent its final outcome: a prohibition on such
knowledge. Thus, they create the desire to know that animates the
text. Moreover, as the secret 'navel' or 'funnel' of the text they
continually suck into themselves any 'truth' that they represent in
order to continue to animate the original desire for interpretation.
Hence, interpretation in its desire to know the self through text
generates the very text it attempts to read. The muse transcends the
text even as she is at its centre just as the interpretation stands
outside and participates in the text it reads. 'Generation' of textual
meaning leads back to the generation (sexual and conceptual) of
self. Within the 'phantastic' (and fantastic literature) the Phallus as
ultimate referent and as transcendent meaning turns inside-out as a
reversed mirror image of itself and becomes the image of the womb:
receiver and deliverer of meaning. Thus, the Phallus creates
'semination'. Yet, in its mirror role as womb, it simultaneously
sucks all such semination into itself, not to give forth meaning but
only in order to reject such semination. This produces a
'dissemination': textuality is created from such an original moment
in both Freud and Poe's narratives.
* * *
The desire to interpret as a desire to animate thus is tied to a radical

form of writing which is both creative and analytic, both inside and
outside the object of analysis. As such we have looked at the text
and the psyche as each crosses and recrosses the other: the text as
psyche, the psyche as sexualized text.
* * *
In relating Freud's concept of Oedipus to Poe's own I have tried to
show the way the compulsion to find the origin of self relates
sexuality and psyche through texts which themselves claim priority
to and stand as the end result of a historical process; the
encyclopaedic text reaches out to encyclopaedic mind. Here stood a
daemonic figure: the 'female with a penis', an all-knowing
daemonic muse whose presence demands the quest for explanation
that ends in finding a female 'phallic' principle which organizes
ourselves and our responses. The knot at the dream or text's navel
becomes opaque as it yields its answers; the oracle tells through
silence. Textuality, sexuality and psyche meet in the Oedipal scene
and are articulated through the Oedipal hero - he who finds the text
and self yet loses both in the attempt!
The psyche's sexuality is revealed through text and the text's
sexuality through the psyche which generates and is generated by
it.
Notes
CHAPTER 1: AN 'OCCULT' RELATIONSHIP
1. Morton Kaplan and Robert Kloss, The Unspoken Motive (New York:
The Free Press, 1973) pp. 4--5.
2. J. A. Leo Lemay, 'The Psychology of "The Murders in the Rue
Morgue" " American Literature (1982) pp. 16&-88 (pp. 170-1).
3. This is not the case in the therapeutic field. See, for example,
Heinrich Racker, Transference and Counter-Transference (London:
Houghton Press, 1974).
4. Jacques Lacan, 'Seminar on "The Purloined Letter" " translated by
Jeffrey Mehlman, Yale French Studies (1973) pp. 3&-72.
5. Andre Green, The Tragic Effect, translated by Alan Sheridan
(Cambridge University Press, 1979).
6. For a partial exploration see Freud, edited by Perry Meisel (New
Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1981). See also The Literary Freud: Mechanisms
of Defense and the Poetic Will, edited by Joseph H. Smith (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1980).
7. David W. Butler, 'Usher's Hypochondriasis: Mental Alienation and
Romantic Idealism in Poe's Gothic Tales', American Literature (1976)
pp. 1-12 (p. 3).
8. For Poe's relationship with psychoanalysis see Kaplan and Kloss,
pp. 189-200. See also Otto Rank, The Double: a Psychoanalytic Study,
translated by Harry Tucker Jr (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1971), pp.25 and 36; Henri Ellenberger, The
Discovery of the Unconscious (London; Penguin, 1970) pp. 161-2 and
Claudia C. Morrison, Freud and the Critic (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1968) pp. 192-202.
9. Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia Edition of the Complete Works of Edgar Allan
Poe, edited by James A. Harrison, vol. 16 (New York: AMS Press,
1965) pp. 3-4. This edition has been adhered to throughout as the
most authoritative available.
10. Wilson O. Clough, 'The Use of Colour Words by Edgar Allan Poe',
Papers of the Modern Language Association (1930) pp. 59&-613.
11. There are numerous studies that have taken this approach, for
example see John W. Robertson, Edgar Allan Poe (a Study) (San
Francisco: Bruce Brough, 1921); Joseph Wood Krutch, Edgar Allall
Poe: a Study in Genius (New York: Russell & Russell, 1926); Marie
Bonaparte, The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe, translated by James
Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1971); Robert Daniel, 'Poe's
Detective God', in Twentieth Century Interpretations of Poe's Tales,
edited by William L. Howarth (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1971)
pp. 103-10 (p. 104). Daniel concludes that, 'Dupin, the Usher-hero
and Edgar A. Poe the critic - are essentially the same personage.'
124
Notes to pp. 5-7 125
12. Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness (London: Faber & Faber, 1958)
pp. 91 and 127.
13. See especially Wolf Mankowitz, The Extraordinary Mr. Poe (London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978); David Sinclair, Edgar Allan Poe
(London: J. M. Dent, 1977).
14. Julian Symons, The Tell- Tale Heart: the Life and Works of Edgar Allan
Poe (London: Faber & Faber, 1978). Edward Wagenacht cannot make
up his mind, for while he separates texts from author and attacks
those that do not do this he is capable of writing, 'here again we may
remind ourselves that we are not concerned with the truth of Poe's
vision in Eureka . .. but only with what it shows about the man'.
Edgar Allan Poe: the Man Behind the Legend (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1963) p. 220.
15. D. J. Mossop, Pure Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971) pp. 47-60.
See also Burton R. Pollin, 'Poe and Godwin', Nineteenth Century
Fiction. (1965) pp. 237-53 and Joel R. Kehler who hunts for
plagiarized sources for Poe's knowledge of gardening. 'New Light on
the Genesis of Poe's Landscape Fiction', American Literature (1975)
pp.173-83.
16. See C. Alphonso Smith, Edgar Allan Poe (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill
Co., 1921).
17. Edward H. Davidson, Poe: a Critical Study (Cambridge, Mass.:
Howard University Press, 1957) p. 223. See also Julian Symons, 124
and George E. Woodberry, Edgar Allan Poe (New York: AMS Press,
1968) pp. 293 and 295-6, Harry Levin, 105 and Elio ChiroI, 'Poe's
Essays on Poetry', Sewanee Review (1960) pp. 390-7.
18. Roland Barthes, 'Textual Analysis of Poe's "Valdemar" " translated
by Geoff Bennington in Untying the Text, edited by Robert Young
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981) pp. 135-60.
19. John Carlos Rowe, 'Writing and Truth in Poe's "Narrative of A.
Gordon Pym" " Glyph (1977) pp. 102-19.
20. J. R. Hammond, An Edgar Allan Poe Companion (London: The
Macmillan Press, 1981) p. 27.
21. Ibid., p. 71.
22. Kaplan and Kloss, pp. 189-200.
23. Mario Praz, 'Edgar Allan Poe', Sewanee Review (1960) pp. 375-89.
24. Edward Wagenacht, p. 221.
25. Jacques Lacan, op. cit.; see also Jacques Derrida, 'The Purveyor of
Truth', translated by Willis Domingo, James Hulbert, Moshe Ron
and M. R. L. (1975) pp. 31-113, and Barbara Johnson, 'The Frame of
Reference', Yale French Studies (1977) pp. 457-505.
26. Rosemary Jackson, ed. cit.
27. Neil Hertz, 'Freud and the Sandman', in Textual Strategies, edited by
Josue V. Harrari (London: Methuen, 1980) pp. 296-321. See also Paul
Roazen, Brother Animal (New York: Knopf, 1969) and K. R. Eissler,
Talent and Genius (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1971).
28. Edgar Allan Poe, 'Eureka', VE, vol. 16, pp. 179-315.
29. See D. H. Lawrence. 'Edgar Allan Poe' in The Recognition of Edgar
Allan Poe, edited by Eric W. Carlsen (Michigan: University of
126 Notes to pp. 10-11
Michigan Press, 1966) pp. 110-27. For a rationale of this approach

and the harm of its consequences see William Carlos Williams,
'Edgar Allan Poe', in the above edition, pp. 127-42.
30. Since the completion of this book a number of works have appeared
re-assessing the work of Freud and the relationship of his work to his
life. While few of these are of interest to us here and none alter the
general thesis of this work a number may be mentioned as of
interest: J. M. Masson's The Assault on Truth (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1985) which attempted to show Freud's 'rigging' of
evidence in order to gain respectability in the scientific community;
Janet Malcolm's In the Freud Archives (London: Jonathan Cape, 1984)
which records the controversial history of Masson's career and book;
Hans Eysenck's Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985) which attempted to destroy
Freud's system and its credibility among the scentific community
and E. M. Thornton's The Freudian Fallacy (London: Paladin, 1986)
which again attempted to discredit Freud's theory. These 'negative'
revisions have been matched only by Bruno Bettelheim's Freud and
Man's Soul (London: Flamingo, 1985) a work whose interest to us is
that it emphasizes Freud's Romantic and metaphysical attachment to
'the soul' and underlines (by implication) Freud's theory as a product
of and a critique of the Romantic sensibility: science and theology.
Poe has been served by fewer books and these have proved less
controversial.Of especial note isJ. Gerald Kennedy's Poe, Death, and
the Life of Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). Perhaps
more relevant to the present volume is the article by Cynthia S.
Jordan, 'Poe's Re-Vision: The Recovery of the Second Story'
(American Literature, vol. 59, no. 1, 1987). In her final paragraph she
states '[t]he domain of Poe's work is also male psyche, and the loss of
'woman' throughout his writings represents a halving of 'man's'
soul, his human potential, and - for the male artist - his imagination.
Telling the story of that loss seems to have been for Poe a compelling
need, for he told it obsessively again and again and clearly derived a
kind of perverse pleasure from doing so. (p. 19)
CHAPTER 2: THE MAGUS: FREUD AND NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE
1. Other authors have hinted at this and documented the parallel

influences between psychology and literature, see esp. Claudia C.
Morrison, p. ix. See also Frederick J. Hoffman, Freudianism and the
Literary Mind (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957).
2. Sigmund Freud, 'A Special Type of Object Choice made by Men', The
Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by
James Strachey, vol. 11 (London: Hogarth Press. [1910] 1955)
pp. 165-75 (p. 165).
3. Ibid., p. 165.
4. Ibid., p. 165.
5. Ibid., p. 165.
6. Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (Chicago University

Press, 1979) p. 374.
7. Sigmund Freud, p. 165.
8. Ibid., p. 165.
9. See Jeffrey Mehlman, 'Trimethylemin: Notes on Freud's Specimen
Dream', in Untying the Text, pp. 179-88.
10. Perry Meisel, op. cit.
11. Sigmund Freud, letter to Lou Andreas-Salome (30 July 1915) in
Collected letters of Sigmund Freud 1873-1939, translated by Tania and
James Stern, edited by Ernest L. Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1965)
p.316.
12. Frank Sulloway, Freud: Biologist of the Mind (London: Fontana, 1980)
p.216.
13. Edgar Allan Poe, 'Eureka', p. 202.
14. Edgar Allan Poe, 'Drake and Halleck Review', VE, vol. 1, pp. 20-30.
15. Sigmund Freud, 'A Special Type of Object Choice made by Men',
p.170.
16. Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer. pp. 4&-9.
17. Ibid., p. 25.
18. Ibid., pp. 3&-9.
19. Ibid., pp. 160-1.
20. Freud originally entitled his Moses and Monotheism a 'novel' for a
discussion see Marthe Robert, Oedipus to Moses, translated by Ralph
Mannheim (London; Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977) p. 38.
21. Ibid., p. 66.
22. Ibid., p. 74.
23. Philip Rieff, p. 162.
24. Ibid., p. 59.
26. Ibid.
CHAPTER 3: SCIENCE AND THE DAEMONIC GAME OF ANALYSIS
1. Sigmund Freud, 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle', p. 35.

2. Ibid., p. 36.
3. Ibid., p. 35.
4. Ibid., p. 35.
5. Ibid., p. 35.
6. Ibid., p. 35.
7. Sigmund Freud, 'Jokes and their Relationship to the Unconscious',
[1905], SE, vol. 8, pp. 9-258. See also Sigmund Freud, 'The Uncanny',
[1919], SE, vol. 17, pp. 217-52 and Sigmund Freud, 'Creative Writing
and Day-dreaming', [1908], vol. 9, pp. 143--53.
8. Sigmund Freud, 'Dreams and Telepathy', [1922], SE, vol. 18,
pp. 197-220. See also Sigmund Freud, 'Great is Diana of the
Ephesians', [1911], SE, vol. 12, pp. 342--4 and Sigmund Freud, 'A
Dream which bore Testimony', [1913], SE, vol. 12, pp. 269-77.
9. Sigmund Freud, 'Dora', p. 114.
10. Sigmund Freud, 'Dreams and Telepathy', p. 197.

11. Ibid., p. 220.
12. Sigmund Freud, 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle', p. 36. See also Jean
Laplanche and J-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (London:
Hogarth Press, 1973) and George Devereux (ed.), Psychoanalysis and
the Occult (London: Souvenir Press, 1974).
13. Freud writes, 'no one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those
half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to
wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle
unscathed'. 'Dora', p. 114.
15. Jacques Derrida, p. 33.
16. James Webb, The Occult Establishment (Glasgow: Richard Drew,
1981).
17. Edgar Allan Poe, 'The Power of Words', VE, vol. 6, pp. 139-43 and
Edgar Allan Poe, 'Mesmeric Revelation', VE, vol. 5, pp. 241-54.
18. See Paul Valery, 'On Poe's "Eureka", in The Recognition of Edgar Allan
Poe, edited by Eric W. Carlsen (University of Michigan Press, 1966)
pp. 109-10.
19. Quoted by John Ostrom, 'Fourth Supplement to the Letters of Poe',
American Literature (1981) pp. 513--36 (p. 528).
20. Edgar Allan Poe, 'The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar', VE vol. 6,
pp. 154-66 (p. 162).
21. Sigmund Freud, 'From the History of an Infantile Neurosis ("The
Wolfman"), [1918], SE, vol. 17, pp. 13--122 (p. 56). Hereafter referred
to as 'The Wolfman'.
22. D. H. Lawrence, 'Edgar Allan Poe', pp. 11~11.
23. Roland Barthes, 'Textual Analysis of Poe's "Valdemar" ',p. 144. For
the historical milieu see Brian Inglis, Natural and Supernatural: a
History of the Paranormal (London: Hodder & Stroughton, 1977)
p.188.
24. Edgar Allan Poe, 'The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherezade',
VE, vol. 6, pp. 78--102 (p. 78).
25. 'Ibid., p. 97.
26. Ibid., p. 97n.
27. Edgar Allan Poe, 'The Colloquy of Monos and Una', VE, vol. 4,
pp. 20~ 12. See also Edgar Allan Poe, 'The Conversation of Eiros and
Charmion', VE, vol. 4, pp. 1-8 and Edgar Allan Poe, 'The Power of
Words', VE, vol. 6, pp. 139-43.
28. Harry Levin, p. 110.
29. Edgar Allan Poe, 'Eureka', p. 192. 'Pundit' first appears in 'Mellonta
Tauta', VE, vol. 6, pp. 197-215 (p. 199) from which the opening letter
of 'Eureka' is taken.
30.. Edgar Allan Poe, 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue', VE, vol. 4,
pp. 146-92 (p. 147).
31. Ibid., p. 147.
32. Ibid., p. 147.
33. Sigmund Freud, 'The Interpretation of Dreams', [1900], SE, vols 4-5,
pp. 339-610 (p. 513).
34. Ibid., p. 513.

35. Edgar Allan Poe, 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue', p. 148.
36. Ibid., p. 148.
37. Sigmund Freud, 'An Autobiographical Study', p. 7.
39. Ibid., p. 150. See also D. J. Mossop on Coleridge's influence, p. 47.
40. Terence Martin, 'The Imagination at Play', in Twentieth Century
Interpretations of Poe's Tales, pp. 2~9 (p. 28).
41. Edgar Allan Poe, 'The Purloined Letter', VE, vol. 6, pp. 2~52 (p. 40).
42. Ibid., pp. 40-1.
43. Ibid., p. 41.
44. R. D. Laing, Self and Others (London: Penguin, 1977) p. 122.
46. Ibid., p. 147.
47. Ibid., p. 147.
48. Ibid., p. 147.
49. Ibid., p. 147.
50. Sigmund Freud, 'Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis ("The
Ratman")' SE [1909) vol. 10, pp. 15~237 (p. 190).
51. Sigmund Freud, 'The Interpretation of Dreams', p. 515.
53. Ibid., p. 149.
54. Helene Cixious, 'Fiction and its Phantoms: a Reading of Freud's
"Das Unheimliche" " translated by Robert Dennome, New Literary
History, (1976) pp. 525--548 (p. 527).
56. Edgar Allan Poe, 'Berenice', VE, vol. 2, pp. 1&--26 (p. 16).
57. Ibid., pp. 16---17.
58. Ibid., p. 17.
59. Ibid., p. 20.
60. Ibid., p. 20.
61. Ibid., p. 20.
62. Ibid., pp. 20-21.
63. See my remarks on Wilson O. Clough in Chapter 1.
64. Edgar Allan Poe, 'Berenice', p. 24.
65. Ibid., p. 25.
66. Ibid., p. 25.
67. Ibid., p. 25.
68. Ibid., pp. 25--6.
69. Ibid., p. 26.
70. Ibid., p. 26.
71. Ibid., p. 26.
72. Ibid., p. 26.
CHAPTER 4: LITERARY SPECULATIONS

1. Sigmund Freud, 'The Wolfman', p. 119.
2. Samuel Weber, 'The Divaricator: Notes on Freud's "Witz" " Glyph
(1977) pp. 1-27 (p. 5).

4. Ibid., p. 57.
6. Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, edited by Lionel
Trilling and Simon Marcus (London: Penguin, 1977) p. 510.
7. Peter Gay, Freud, Jews and other Germans (Oxford University Press,
1978) p. 53.
8. Richard Wilbur, 'The House of Poe', in Poe: a Collection of Critical
Essays, pp. 98-120 (p, 101).
9. Marie Bonaparte, p. 609.
10. Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer, pp. 227-8. Kenneth Burke writes:
'we must know that metaphor is not literal' see Language as Symbolic
Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968) p. 12.
11.. Neil Hertz, p. 300.
12. Jacques Derrida, 'Speculations - on Freud " translated by Ian
Macleod, Oxford Literary Review (1979) pp. 78-97 (p. 93).
13. Neil Hertz, p. 320.
14. Wolfgang Iser, 'The Current Situation of Literary Theory: Key
Concepts and the Imaginary' New Literary History (1979) pp. 1-20
(p.5).
15. Sigmund Freud, 47 and Edgar Allan Poe, 'Eureka', p. 187.
17. Edgar Allan Poe, p. 212 and Sigmund Freud, p. 7.
18. Edgar Allan Poe, pp. 343-6.
20. Ibid., p. 7.
21. Ibid., p. 7.
22. Edgar Allan Poe, p. 239.
24. Ibid., p. 30.
26. Ibid., p. 266.
27. Ibid., p. 197.
28. Ibid., p. 209.
29. Marie Bonaparte, p. 610.
31. Ibid., p. 196.
32. Sigmund Freud, p. 50. See also letter 43, Collected Correspondence,
p. 160. Here Freud refers to himself as a 'budding poet'.
35. Sigmund Freud, 'An Autobiographical Study' p. 7.
38. Ibid., p. 188.
39. Ibid., p. 206.
41. Ibid., p. 57.
42. Ibid., p. 45.
43. Ibid., p. 58.

44. Ibid., p. 59.
45. Jacques Derrida, pp. 92-5.
47. Quoted by Frank Sulloway, p. 144.
48. Edgar Allan Poe, 'Marginalia', p. 144.
49. Sigmund Freud, 'Civilization and its Discontents', [1930], SE, vol. 21,
pp. 64-148 (pp. 69-71).
CHAPTER 5: THE WIZARDRY OF LANGUAGE
1. Philip Rieff, p. 43. See also Ernest Wolf and Sue S. Nebel,
'Psychoanalytic Excavations: the structure of Freud's cosmography',
American Imago (1978) pp. 178--202 (pp. 178--201).
2. Peter Gay, p. 44.
3. Sigmund Freud, 'Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical
Account of a Case of Paranoia ("Schreber")', [1910], vol. 12, pp. 9-80
(p.43).
4. Ted Cohen, 'Metaphor and the Cultivation of Intimacy', in On
Metaphor, edited by Sheldon Sacks (Chicago University Press, 1980)
pp. 1-10 (p. 3).
5. Anthony Wilden, System and Structure (London: Tavistock, 1981)
pp. 44 and 26.
6. Sigmund Freud, 'The Interpretation of Dreams', p. 312.
7. Sigmund Freud, 'Civilization and its Discontents', p. 70.
8. Edgar Allan Poe, 'Eureka', p. 290. This is repeated in 'Marginalia',
p.22.
9. Sigmund Freud, 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle', JJ. 28.
10. Ibid., p. 28.
11. Ibid., p. 28.
12. Gillian Beer, 'Ghosts', Essays in Criticism (1978) pp. 259-64 (p. 260).
13. Sigmund Freud, 'The Wolfman', p. 26.
14. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, translated by
Wade Baskin (London: Fontana, 1974) p. 70.
15. Ibid., p. 74.
16. Ibid., p. 82.
18. Ibid., p. 187.
19. Ibid., p. 187.
20. Ferdinand de Saussure, p. 23.
21. Ibid., p. 75.
22. Ibid., p. 112.
23. Ibid., p. 103.
24. Edgar Allan Poe, 'Berenice', p. 14.
25. Edgar Allan Poe, 'The Assignation', pp. 119-20.
26. Edgar Allan Poe' Al Aaraaf', VE, vol. 7, pp. 23--39 and Edgar Allan
Poe, 'Tamerlane', vol. 7, pp. 1-9.
27. Edgar Allan Poe, 'The Power of Words', p. 143. See also Stuart
Levine, 'In the Mystical Moist Air', American Quarterly (1962),

pp.202-3.
28. Ibid., p. 143. .
30. Edgar Allan Poe, 'Democratic Review', VE, vol. 16, p. 28.
31. Daniel Hoffman, p. 93.
32. In 'the Gospel According to St. John' Logos is both, 'breath' and
'Spirit' revealed as the creative primal 'Word'.
33. Edgar Allan Poe, 'Letter to B -', VE vol. 7, p. xliii.
34. Edgar Allan Poe, 'William Wilson', VE, vol. 3, pp. 299-325, (p. 303).
36. Edgar Allan Poe, 'The Imp of the Perverse', pp. 147-8.
37. G. R. Thompson, Poe's Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales
(University of Winsconsin Press, 1973) pp. 173-4.
38. Edgar Allan Poe, The Man of the Crowd', p. 134.
40. G. R. Thompson, pp. 173-4.
41. William Carlos Williams, p. 132.
42. See Donald Barlow Stauffer, 'Style and Meaning in "Ligeia" and
"William Wilson"', in Twentieth Century Interpretations of Poe's
Tales, pp. 78--86 (p. 85).
43. Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Textual Production, translated by
Geoffrey Wall (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978) p. 29.
44. Edgar Allan Poe, 'The Imp of the Perverse', p. 150.
45. Edgar Allan Poe, 'The Philosophy of Composition', VE, vol. 14,
pp. 193-208 (p. 202).
46. Ibid., pp. 207-8.
CHAPTER 6: REVELATION, PRIMAL TRUTH ...
1. Jacques Derrida, 'Speculations - On Freud', p. 91.

2. This is exactly the condition of 'The Man of the Crowd'.
3. Edgar Allan Poe, 'Narrative of A. Gordon Pym', p. 242.
4. Edgar Allan Poe, 'A Descent into the Maelstrom', VE, vol. 2,
pp. 225-47 (p. 247).
5. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams', p. 525.
6. Ibid., p. 525.
7. J. Brander Matthews, 'Poe and the Detective Story', in The
Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe edited by Eric W. Carlsen (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1966) pp. 81-93, (p. 85-6).
9. Edgar Allan Poe, 'Narrative of A. Gordon Pym', p. 245.
10. Ibid., p. 245. See also John Carlos Rowe, pp. 102-19.
12. Ibid., p. 92.
13. Edgar Allan Poe, 'The Assignation', p. 112.
14. Roland Barthes, 'Textual Analysis of Poe's "Valdemar", p. 153.
15. Edgar Allan Poe, 'The Man of the Crowd', p. 134.
Notes to pp. 87-100 133
16. Ibid., p. 134.

17. Ibid., p. 134.
18. Ibid., p. 134.
19. Rosemary Jackson, pp. 29-30.
20. Daniel Hoffman, p. 113.
23. Ibid., p. 208.
26. Edgar Allan Poe, 'The Power of Words', p. 139.
27. Edgar Allan Poe, 'AI Aaraaf', p. 28
28. Edgar Allan Poe, 'The Imp of the Perverse', p. 145.
29. Ibid., p. 145.
30. Ibid., p. 145.
31. See Marthe Robert on Freud's relationship with the 'Logos', From
Oedipus to Moses translated by Ralph Mannheim (London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1977) p. 38.
32. Samuel Weber, p. 11.
33. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams', p. 525.
35. Jacques Derrida, 'Difference', translated by David B. Allison in
Speech and Phenomena (Evanston: Northweston University Press)
pp. 129-60 (p. 152).
36. Octave Mannoni, Freud: the Theory of the Unconscious translated by
Renaud Bruce (London: Pantheon, 1971) p. 20.
37. Edgar Allan Poe, 'Dream-Land' VE, vol. 7, p. 89.
38. Philip Rieff, pp. 364 and 381.
CHAPTER 7: THE ENCYCLOPAEDIC MIND
1. Sigmund Freud, 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle', pp. 57-8.

2. Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis translated by
Geoffrey Mehlman (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1973) p. 112.
3. Percival Bailey, p. 52. See also Ludwig Wittgenstein, 'Conversations
on Freud' in Philosophers on Freud, edited by Richard Wollheim (New
York: James Aronson Inc., 1977) pp. 1-10 pp. 8-9).
4. Jacques Derrida, 'The Purveyor of Truth', p. 52.
5. Philip Rieff, p. 46 and R. C. Calogeras, 'Levi-Strauss and Freud'
American Imago (1973) pp. 57-79 (p. 61).
7. Sigmund Freud, 'Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety', SE, [1926],
vol. 20, pp. 87-169 (p. 103).
8. Ibid., p. 91.
9. See editor's note in Jacques Lacan, 'Seminar on "The Purloined
Letter" " p. 72a.
10. Jacques Derrida, pp. 39 and 43.
134 Notes to pp. 100-16
11. Ibid., pp. 46-7.

12. Martin Farquhar Tupper' American Romance', in The Recognition of
Edgar Allan Poe, pp. 1~21 (p. 19).
13. Edgar Allan Poe, 'Thou art the Man', p. 290.
14. Edgar Allan Poe, 'Eleonora', VE, vol. 4, pp. 236-44 (p. 237).
15. Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer, pp. 143-4.
16. Ibid., p. 51. Jacques Lacan writes of the 'stumbling' in sentences
where the patient's words appear 'elsewhere' (i.e. via the presence of
the analyst). See Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis translated by Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin,
1977) p. 25.
17. Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer, 'Studies on Hysteria', SE, [1895],
vol. 2, pp. 1-319, (pp. 143-4).
18. Ibid., p. 103.
19. Sigmund Freud, 'Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety', p. 108.
20. Sigmund Freud, 'Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria
("Dora")' SE, [1905] vol. 7, pp. 3-122 (p. 99).
22. Sigmund Freud, 'Dora', p. 100.
23. Ibid., p. 100.
24. Ibid., p. 100--1.
25. Ibid., p. 102.
26. Ibid., pp. 101-2.
27. Ibid., p. 103.
28. For Freud's relationship with the Bible and the abstract world of the
'Book' in relationship to European culture see Marthe Robert, p. 22.
30. Edgar Allan Poe, 'The Purloined Letter', p. 28.
31. See Daniel Hoffman, p.223, see also Jules Zanger, 'Poe and the
Theme of Forbidden Knowledge', American Literature (1977) pp. 533-
43. Zanger misses the connection with Poe's women as muse figures
but makes some interesting comments on Goethe's Faust and Poe's
heros. He writes, 'the contrast with Faust reveals Poe's protagonists
to be essentially passive rather than active' (p. 535). Zanger
concludes that Faust engages with the world whereas Poe's heros
retreat from it toward those very books Faust disdains.
32. Edgar Allan Poe, 'Ligeia' VE, vol. 2, pp. 24~68, (pp. 253-4). For the
use of the possessive pronoun see Donald Barlow Stauffer, p. 80.
33. Wagenacht points to Poe's use of the encyclopaedia but misses the
point, (p. 87).
34. Edgar Allan Poe, 'Ligeia', pp. 25~60.
35. Edgar Allan Poe, 'The Assignation', pp. 115--16.
36. Edgar Allan Poe, 'The Fall of the House of Usher', VE, vol. 3,
pp. 273-97 (p. 287).
37. Edgar Allan Poe, 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue; pp. 170--1.
38. George Steiner, Extraterritorial (London: Peregrine, 1975) pp. 3~9.
40. George Steiner, pp. 3~9.
41. Victor Tausk, 'On the Origin of the "Influencing Machine" in
Notes to pp. 116-20 135
Schizophrenia', translated by Dorian Feigenbaum, in The Psycho-

Analytic Reader, edited by Robert Fliess (London: Hogarth Press,
1951) pp. 31-64.
42. R. D. Laing, Self and Others, ed. cit.
44. Sigmund Freud, 'Dora', pp. 59-60.
45. Sigmund Freud, 'Schreber', p. 44.
46. Edgar Allan Poe, 'Twice-Told Tales', VE, vol. 13, p. 141 (p. 148).
47. Edgar Allan Poe, 'The Philosophy of Composition', p. 202.
48. Edgar Allan Poe, 'The Coloquy of Monos and Una', p. 205.
49. Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, translated by Richard Howard
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1979) p. 122.
50. William Carlos Williams, p. 139.
51. Edgar Allan Poe, 'Ligeia', p. 250.
52. Ibid., p. 250.
53. Fritz Wittels writes, with regard to the Don Juan myth of his search
for knowledge, that, 'every woman becomes a mother image as long
as she seems unobtainable. Once she is his, once she is revealed as a
reality, she is no longer fitted to guide the eternal demonical search'.
See 'Psychoanalysis and Literature' in Psychoanalysis Today. edited
by Sandor Lorand (London: Allen & Unwin, 1948) pp. 371-80
(p.373).
Index
'Agathos',75 'Dr. M', 26
Amnesia, 12, 40 'Dupin', 27-30, 76, 114-15
Andreas-Salome, Lou, 13
'Anna 0' 14 'Ebn Zaiat', 40
'Aristoph~nes', 58, 98 'Egaeus', 35-6, 38, 43
Aristotle, 57 Ego, the, 46
'St Austin', 38 'Elizabeth Von R', 14
Automatism, 9, 92 Ellenberger, Henri, 124n
'Emmy Von N', 14-15
Bailey, Percival, 99 Epilepsy, 34
Barthes, Roland, 5, 8, 23, 87 'Eternal City' (as metaphor), 61, 64-6, 69
Beer, Gillian, BIn Eysenck, Hans, 126n
'Berenice', 39
Bernays,Jacob,101 Fleiss, Wilhelm, 21, 60
Bettelheim, Bruno, 126n 'Fort/da', 34, 45, 51
Binet, A. 8., 48 Flud, Robert, 113
Bloom, Harold, 116
Boehme, Jacob, 116 Gay, Peter, 47
Bonaparte, Marie, 3, 5-6, 43, 47 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von, 134n
Breuer, Joseph, 13, 48 Gorgias,79
Bruyere, La, 87 Gospel accordll1g 10 51. ,01111, 75
'Braid of Manchester', 23 Green, Andre, 2
Burke, Kenneth, 46
Butler, David, 3 Hammond, J. R., 6
Hertz, Neil, 7,49
Calcutta, Mesmeric Hospital of, 23 Hoffman, Daniel, 76
Calogeras, R. c., 133n 'Holberg', 113
Castration, 105 Homosexuality, 1-2
Cathexes, 54 Hoyle, Edmond, 32
Charcot, Jean Martin, 23 Humboldt, Alexander Von, 50
Cixous, Helene, 34 Hypnotism, 22-3, 25
Clough, Wilson 0., 5 Hysteria, 15, 23--4, 48
Cohen, Ted, BIn
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 27, 77, 83 Id, the, 92, 94
Complex, 16 Incest, 118
Compulsion-to-repeat, 18 'Irma', 26
Iser, Wolfgang, 50
Daemonic, the, 9,18,20,92,103,120,123
Daniel, Robert, 124n Jackson, Rosemary, 7, 88
Demon, the, 1 Janet, Pierre, 48
Derrida, Jacques, 7-8, 59-60, 84, 94, 100 Johnson, Barbara, 7
Descartes, Rene, 43 Jones, Ernest, 46, 60
'Dora', 20, 44, 63, 105-9, 117-8, 120 Jordan, Cynthia S., 126n
Dostoevsky, Feodor, 3
Double, the, 1, 6 Kabbala, fhe, 91, 116
Dream-thoughts, 64, 85, 93 Kafka, Franz, 3
Dream-work, 64 Kaplan, Morton, 1-2
Drives, the, 18, 20, 99 Kohler, Joel R., 125n
136
Index 137
Kennedy, J. Gerald, 126n Praz, Mario, 6

Kepler, Johann, 56, 6~1 Primal scene, 16
Kloss, Robert, 1-2 Psyche, the, 64, 72-3, 96
Krutch, Joseph Wood, 6 'Pundit', 25
Puysegur, Marquis Armand de, 23
Lacan, Jacques, 2, 7-9, 30, 100
'Lady of Shallot, the,' 76-7 Rabkin, Erix, ix
Laing, R. D., 30, 116 Racker, Heinrich, 124n
Laplace, Pierre Simon de, 55 Rank, Otto, 124n
Laplanche, Jean, 18, 99 'Ratman', 32
Lawrence, D. H., 23 Rieff, Philip, 16-17,95
Leibnitz, Gottfried, 79 Robert, Marthe, 127n
Lemay, J. A. Leo, 1-2 Robertson, John W., 6
Levin, Harry, 25 Rosse, Lord, 47
Levine, Stuart, 132n Rowe, John Carlos, 5-6
'Ligeia', 120
'Little Hans', 100 Sadism, 47
Logos, 75-7, 83, 115 Salpetriere, la, 22
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 69-73
Macherey, Pierre, 81 Schizophrenia, 2, 30, 44
Machiavelli, 113 'Schreber', 62-3
Malcolm, Janet, 126n Smith, C. Alphonso, 125n
Mannoni, Octave, 94 Somnabulism, 23
Markowitz, Wolf, 125n Sophocles, 101
Masson, J. M., 126n Strauffer, Donald Barlow, 80
Masochism, 45 Steiner, George, 115-16
Matthews, J. Brander, 85 Sulloway, Frank, 13
Mesmer, 23 Superego, 92
Mesmerism, 24 Supernatural, the, 25
Metapsychology, 46, 51-2 Swedenborg, Emmuel, 113
Moebius-strip, 68 Symons, Julian, 125n
Monomania, 34, 42-3 Symposium (of Plato), 58, 98
Morrison, Claudia c., 124n
Mossop, D. 1., 5 Tausk, Victor, 116
Telepathy, 20
Narcissism, 59 Tertullian, 38
Neurosis, 99, 109 Thompson, G. R., 79, 81
Newton, Isaac, 52-3 Thornton, G. M., 126n
Transference, 1-2, 9, 2~1, 31, 105
Occult, the, 9, 2~2, 24 Translation, 4
Oedipus, 30, 96, 98-9, 101-3, 108-9, Trauma, 104
119-21, 123 Tupper, Martin Farquhar, 101
Omphallos, 86, 93
Origins, 10, 12 Unconscious, the, 9, 12, 94, 119
Ostrom, John, 128n Ur-spraclze, 115-16
Overdetermination, 2, 32, 63, 89, 105, 'Usher, Roderick', 6, 35, 113
117-18
'Valdemar', 22, 24
Paranoia, 43 Valery, Paul, 128n
Pcpt-Cs, 66
Phallus, the, 1O~1, 105, 121-2 Wagenacht, Edward, 6
Plato, 58 Webb, James, 18, 21
Pollin, Burton R., 125 Weber, Samuel, 45, 93
Pontalis, J. B., 18 Wilber, Richard, BOn
138 Index
Wilden, Anthony, 63 Zanger, Jules, 134n

Williams, William Carlos, 80 Zeus, 98
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 133n Zwang, see under Drives
Wittels, Fritz, 135n
'Wolfman', 44
Word, the, see under Logos

Reading Poe, Reading Freud (Clive Bloom, 1988)

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READING POE READING FREUD

Also by Clive Bloom

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission

Typeset by Vine & Gorfin Ltd, Exmouth

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

I should like to thank Maud Ellmann of Southampton University to

Literary analysis and psychoanalytic interpretation have a long

work, no careful and complete study has been made of them. 6

I chose Poe and Freud because of the 'unwritten' and curious

studies have already done so may seem injudicious. However, I

implications of this reconstituting of Poe's work in the light of his

Bonaparte. Moreover, Rowe occassionally lapses into a reductionist

within the path Freud mapped out. Nevertheless it invites us to

other; the moment that a reading attempts to codify its meaning.

Evidently, it could be argued that Poe and Freud do not share a

complex series of figurative tropes, tropes that both embody the

Many critics have recognised the importance of literature in Freud's

fiction is precisely that form of 'distortion' and 'condensation' to

the pleasure principle of which our mental activity is capable.'8

cosmological interpretation, 'Eureka'. The comparison of fictional

only by this new method of research and analysis can a door

I have not always been a psychotherapist. Like other

Freud says he uses scientific methods, 'psychological formulas',

necessity, built into Freud's technique. This leads an analyst such

Breuer and Freud in 'Studies on Hysteria' is therefore to re-enter a

The founder of psychoanalysis can also be seen to have searched

In Freudian Vocabulary, 'Zwang' is used to denote a

It is to 'novelty' and its special status as affect that Freud turns in

of repetition in its cultural forms of artistic production. He begins

In an effort to reopen the problem of repetition and novelty and by

Nowhere is this interest in the older forms of 'occultism' better

individual psyche as revealed to that other presence, the

Through links such as hypnotism, Freud associated for a long

Freud's approach to analysis is tied to his narration of the patient's

returns us to the conclusions to Freud's case-histories?O When

Following Mesmer (in English, 'magnetism' can be called

hypnosis (although Poe, pointing out Valdemar's 'nervousness',

Thus, Poe's use of mesmerism exploits a strong contemporary issue

Among the magicians, were domesticated several animals of very

Appended to this invention of the 'magicians' is a careful factual

'Mesmeric Revelation'.27 In 'Mesmeric Revelation' and 'The Facts in

[Poe's] youthful sonnet 'To Science' voices the stock objection of

analyst, always uses the analogy of the 'game' with which to

'The measures, then', [Dupin] continued, 'were good in their

The Prefect habituated to the use of 'measures', is unable to

Consequently the analyst (Poe's 'reasoner') makes an

Upon inquiring of the boy by what means he effected the

the reader) to a problem centred on the very textuality in which that

I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of

Whist is the psychological game 'where mind struggles with mind'

which all the possible identifications and interpretations must be

He forced himself to understand the precise meaning of every

The patient like the analyst understands the first answer as a

To observe attentively is to remember distinctly; and so far, the

retentive memory, and to proceed by 'the book', are points

Moreover, the 'necessary knowledge of what to observe will

possession of the contents of each hand, and thenceforward puts

At the 're-solution' of the game of whist Poe resolves for his

misery. Indeed, the first paragraph is a physical description ot

Misery is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform.

My baptismal name is Egaeus; that of my family I will not

gallery of antique paintings - in the fashion of the library

Thus the narrator's family members are connected through the

Expelled from the 'real' (a Neo-Platonic pre-existence that 'was not