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Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, Volume 53, Number 4, Autumn

2010, pp. 596-604 (Article)

3XEOLVKHGE\-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV
DOI: 10.1353/pbm.2010.0006

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pbm/summary/v053/53.4.yang.html

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Psychoanalysis and
Detective Fiction

a tale of Freud and criminal stor ytelling

Amy Yang

ABSTRACT Much has been written about Freud’s influence on popular culture.
This article addresses the influence of literature on Freud’s psychoanalytical theory,
specifically the role that modern detective fiction played in shaping Freudian theory.
Edgar Allan Poe gave Freud the literary precedent; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation
Sherlock Holmes gave him the analytical model. In turn, the world of crime story-
telling embedded Freudian theories in subsequent forms, spinning the tales of crime
into a journey into the human mind. As these tales were popularized on the silver
screen in the early 20th century, psychoanalytical ideas moved from the lecture halls
into the cultural mainstream.

and modern detective fiction evolved into their mod-

B OTH PSYCHOANALYSIS
ern form around the turn of 20th century. In several ways, their develop-
ment reflected the turbulent time period: an era that saw increasing doubt over
logic and reason as ways to govern the world and that questioned humanity’s
ability to redeem itself through progress and knowledge. Detective fiction was an
attempt to solve the unexpected through logic and reasoning, while psycho-
analysis was a way to make coherence out of a fragmented presentation.The pre-
ceding period had marked a growing public concern over crime in urban areas
that was fed into public consciousness by the burgeoning print industry.After the

Department of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, University of Chicago, 5841 S. Maryland Avenue, MC

3077, Chicago IL 60635.
E-mail: ayang@yoda.bsd.uchicago.edu.

Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, volume 53, number 4 (autumn 2010):596–604

© 2010 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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Psychoanalysis and Detective Fiction

establishment of the world’s first public police force, the Metropolitan Police in
London in 1829, it was only a matter of time before the sensationalistic, journal-
istic storytelling of crime solving would blossom into a genre of its own.
However, psychoanalysis and detective genre shared more than just a historical
moment. Freud himself was intensely interested in detective stories, and for him
the archetype of detective reasoning was Sherlock Holmes. Freud felt that psycho-
analysis had plenty to offer the field of crime detection.The fervor was returned
by the literary circle, which saw in psychoanalysis a field that offered a fresh new
approach to solving crime. No longer was it enough to simply describe the events
that unfolded in a crime incident, nor was it satisfactory to end the story at the
discovery of the murderer.The readers wanted more than just plot—the notion of
motive and intent had become an important element of the storytelling. Part of this
desire was due to the nature of crime detection: a death can only be considered
murder and not manslaughter with the establishment of mens rae in the criminal
case under the English law (Sayre 1932). However, with the introduction of the
unconscious mind into mainstream discussion, psychoanalysis offered a concept
more intriguing than just the obvious, surface motive. It delved into the criminal’s
mind, teasing out the underlying driving force for murder, even if the criminal was
not actively aware of it at the time of crime. In other words, it dislodged the notion
of free will from intent to commit crime. The murderer may have intended to
commit the crime, but was the intention a product of his or her own will?
Before diving into the structure of modern detective novels, it is necessary to
look at what contributions psychoanalysis gave to the nonmedical community.
For practical purposes, psychoanalysis here will refer to Freud’s development of
this practice. Freud described psychoanalysis as “a procedure for the medical
treatment of neurotic patients,” in which “nothing takes place . . . but an inter-
change of words between the patient and the analyst” (Freud 1915–17, p. 43). In
other words, Freud in his practice had invented space in which two people have
a dialogue, in which no one else but the analyst and the patient could witness
(Horrocks 2001). In addition, Freud introduced the concept of the unconscious
into everyday life. In the Introduction to his lecture series, Freud announced that
“Mental processes are in themselves unconscious and that of all mental life it is
only certain individual acts and portions that are conscious” (Freud 1915–17, p.
46). Freud’s use of the term unconscious referred to the passive side—that is, to
things occurring without active knowledge. It was the concept of the uncon-
scious that lent itself most readily to literary interpretation, and writers eagerly
incorporated this concept into their work.
Freud also recast the ways in which the criminal mind was portrayed in his
book The Ego and the Id (1923), in which he stated, “Criminals do not feel guilt
because they are already criminals, but they become criminals because they al-
ready feel guilt” (pp. 393–94). This concept of unconscious guilt, which Freud
further explored in his later works, influenced the question of motive in discus-
sions of detective fiction.

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The Beginning: Poe’s Unconsciousness

Many considered Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) the inventor of modern detec-
tive writing, beginning with his classic short story “The Murders in the Rue
Morgue,” which stars a brilliant young detective by the name of Dupin. Dupin
served as the precursor to some of the more familiar successors—Holmes,
Poirot—and introduced the figure of the amateur armchair detective.What dis-
tinguished Poe’s stories from the earlier forms of crime stories was his use of
analysis (May 1991). Rather than simply describing the chronological sequence
of events, Poe revealed pieces of information through the detective’s reasoning
and thought processes. But the most striking aspect about Poe’s stories was the
way he created his space. In “The Purloined Letter,” the mystery is solved almost
entirely on circumstantial inference, what one would call a “pen-and-paper
detective.”The story to be solved no longer revolved around a physical space, but
rather a symbolic one (Rosenheim 1995). It was entirely within this symbolic
space that the mysteries of the mind would be solved.This literary recreation of
the mind is perhaps best reflected in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” where
the house—which many critics felt is the inner soul of the narrator—is an
“image of the gray sedge . . . the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like
windows” (Poe 1917). Poe’s image of the inner mind is that of a rotting, decay-
ing space, one isolated from the outer world, where lights barely shine through.
In addition, Poe’s obsession with the mental agony before death and his em-
phasis on language deficit revealed his causal association between physical trauma
and linguistic damage. In “Rue Morgue” the strangled victim’s tongue is partially
bitten off, and in “The Facts in the Case of M.Valdemar,” the victim bursts out
with “ejaculations of ‘dead! Dead! Dead!’ from the tongue” (Poe 1984, pp. 839–
40). Freud took a similar stance in his case study regarding the Wolf Man, whose
symptoms he hypothesized stemmed from “a multilingual verbarium of key
words, which indirectly name the principle traumas of his life” (Rosenheim
1995, p. 156). Poe would have advocated a more literal interpretation, for he
wrote in “Rue Morgue,” “the voices of the madmen . . . even in their wildest
paroxysms . . . have always the coherence of syllabication” (Poe 1984, p. 402).
It is reasonable to conclude that Poe’s literary creation of human unconscious
as a separate inner space influenced the way in which Freud depicted the id. In
his short preface to his pupil Marie Bonaparte’s work The Life and Works of Edgar
Allan Poe (1933), Freud commented on Poe’s ingenuity, calling him a “great
writer of a pathological type” and noting that his works aroused “a particular fas-
cination in studying the laws of the human mind as exemplified in outstanding
individuals” (p. 254).

Holmes and Freud

Of all the early detective stories and criminal tales, it is the adventures of Sher-
lock Holmes that share the most obvious structural similarities with Freud’s case

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studies.The figures of Holmes and Freud, each an archetype of his respective field,
have etched their influence on public imagination far beyond their contempo-
raries. But the two share more than legendary fame, iconic adulteration, and love
of cocaine (Shepherd 1985).The titles of their stories, which usually describe the
main personality of the story, share a certain theatrical style. Titles like “The
Crooked Man” and “A Case of Identity” in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
(1892) draw ready comparisons to Freud’s titles “The Rat Man” and “The Case
of Anna O.” Beyond the title, the method by which Freud constructs his case
shows remarkable similarity to the way in which Holmes presents his case to Wat-
son. The similarity is not coincidental. Freud had a marked interest in stories of
crime, and he particularly delighted in reading the tales of Sherlock Holmes.
Interestingly, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) modeled his famous cre-
ation partially on Poe’s Dupin, but mainly on his mentor and medical professor
Dr. Joseph Bell (Accardo 1992). That Doyle was a physician is no secret. It is
therefore not surprising that the medical method of detection—in other words,
the technique of history taking—would feature prominently in his fiction, albeit
adapted for the crime scene. Doyle had more than once noted his mentor’s
observation of detail and had incorporated it into his writing: he noted his men-
tor’s “penetrating grey eyes, eagle nose . . . and of his eerie trick of spotting
details” (Doyle 1924, p. 63). In his lectures, Bell emphasized that “I always im-
pressed over and over again upon my students the vast important of little dis-
tinctions, the endless significance of the trifles” (Accardo 1992, p. 119).What was
unconventional about Holmes’s and Freud’s method is that they both seem to
fixate on details that initially appear to be trivial, or to weigh the clues in an en-
tirely different manner from everyone else, despite having received the same in-
formation. For example, in “Valley of Fear,” a ruthless murder has occurred in a
fortress-like English country house, with a secret society lurking behind the
murderer. Despite numerous accounts from contradictory witness, the sighting
of an unknown man, and suspicion being cast on an illicit couple, Holmes bases
his entire solution on one missing dumbbell. How did one dumbbell hold the
key to the entire mystery? And more importantly, how did Holmes know that
the dumbbell is the key to solving the crime?
There are, of course, key differences in Holmes’s model of deduction and
Freud’s method of psychoanalysis. For one, on the surface Holmes’s deductive
reasoning appears to result from an objective survey of the surroundings and a
careful internal assessment of possible exclusions. However, as Doyle himself
acknowledged, on deeper examination Holmes’s reasoning is anything but
rational. In stories such as “The Sign of Four,” Holmes has to correct himself
from an overzealous inference and return to a simpler explanation. It is the qual-
ity of their storytelling that draws readers into both Freud’s and Doyle’s works,
yet it is the same style that ultimately misguides readers into thinking that what
has happened is factual, when in reality it is simply a reconstruction of the facts
in the storyteller’s mind.

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Created in the late 19th century, Holmes represents the last of the Victorian
heroes: a man thoroughly convinced of the infallibility of logic and reason, a man
who trusts that observation and deduction will lead to the source, a figure that
epitomizes the ability of a trained mind to extrapolate from details and recon-
struct the grand story (Jann 1995). Holmes reflects a period that seemed to put
nearly unlimited faith in science and progress, a period of confidence shortly be-
fore the disintegration into chaos and unease that characterizes the early 20th
century. This era of fragmentation also gave birth to Freud and his search into
the unknown, into what was, and still can be, considered the final frontier of
human knowledge: the source of it all, the human mind.
The affinity of psychoanalysis for crime detection was not lost on Freud.
Freud’s main goal was to help shed light on the concept of neurosis, and in the
process to bring order into something long viewed as chaotic and incomprehen-
sible. He believed that the tools of psychoanalysis could benefit the art of detec-
tion, and in his 1906 paper “Psychoanalysis and the Ascertaining of Truth in
Courts of Law,” he stated that
In both we are concerned with a secret, something hidden. . . . In the case of the
criminal it is a secret which he hides from you, but in the case of hysterics it is a
secret hidden from himself. . . .The task of the therapeutist is, however, the same
as the task of the judge; he must discover the hidden psychic material.To do this
we have invented various methods of detection, some of which lawyers are now
going to imitate. (Freud 1924–1950, p. 98)

What Freud particularly brought to the detective community was the concept
of utilizing the unconscious to aid in crime solving. In his Introductory Lectures on
Psychoanalysis (1915–17), Freud described at length the phenomenon of para-
praxes, which he described as errors that reveal repressed motives, such as slips of
the tongue. For example, Freud described a woman’s remark when asked about
her husband’s health:“The doctor told him that he has no need to diet: he could
drink and eat whatever I want” (p. 61).The woman clearly meant to say that her
husband could eat or drink whatever he wanted, but in her mind she was think-
ing “What should the husband want to eat, but what I want him to eat?” In this
and other examples, Freud saw the slip not as by chance or accident, as some of
his contemporaries did, but rather as a mental act that resulted from two oppos-
ing intentions of the mind. Freud extended this interpretation into other acci-
dents of life, what he called “bungled actions.” For example, a man who was
made against his will to visit someone in another town, took a train there only
to transfer to the wrong train at the junction station, and ended back in his orig-
inal town. Freud saw this as a way for the unconscious mind to fulfill a wish that
a person had consciously refuted.
The phenomenon of parapraxes, when applied to criminal detection, can
offer a very different perspective of the same crime scene. In A Study in Scarlet
(1887), Holmes and Watson arrive at a crime scene at which a man has been

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murdered, with the word “RACHE” written in dried blood. For the police
detective, the writing seems obvious: the dead man was trying to express his last
message to his mistress Rachel but expired beforehand. Holmes reaches a differ-
ent conclusion: he sees it as the murderer’s attempt to mislead the investigators
about the identity of the murderer. Rache is German for revenge, and perhaps the
murderer was creating a distraction. However, if Freud were at the crime scene,
he would undoubtedly give a different explanation. For why would the mur-
derer take time to write anything, except to give the investigators an extra clue
about the nature of the crime? The murderer could very well have walked out
of the house, leaving few traceable marks, and vanished from the scene forever.
Yet that was not what he did. He stayed in the house long enough to write the
letters on the wall, risking the chance of been discovered as he performed the
task, and also giving away his motive for murder. For Freud, the case would be
clear: even if the murderer consciously attempted to convince himself that the
clue was to distract the investigators, the ultimate reason for his act arose from
his unconscious desire to be discovered, perhaps as a desire for recognition, per-
haps as atonement for the crime, or perhaps as an alleviant for his guilt. It is the
same for the murderer who goes back to the scene of crime, or who sends the
police department a picture of the crime afterwards, or who accidentally leaves
behind a piece of identifying information.

Cinema: Fantasy Envisioned

If psychoanalysis brings a new tool to uncover the rationale behind the crime, it
also ultimately undermines the traditional concept of narrative by its own nature.
Traditional detective progression dictates the discovery of truth via didactic rea-
soning and compulsive attention to details.There is no place in the Holmes tra-
dition for the alternate truth. Yet the Freudian narrative emphasizes the
metaphorical, in which languages remain figurative and intentions hypothetical
(Spence 1987). Seldom do events unfold as they are presented during initial
encounter. Discovery of the unspoken and unknown, therefore, must be realized
by the interpreter.
Despite the seeming paradox Freudian theory present to the traditional mode
of detective storytelling, its influence quickly permeated the silver screen. From
the early 20th century onward, Hollywood became instrumental in populariz-
ing psychoanalysis to the mainstream culture consciousness.This occurred con-
comitantly with the growth of the crime film industry, within which several
genres developed, including film noir and hardboiled crime films. Film noir, with
its emphasis on moral ambiguity and sexual motivation and deliberation on
scenes of chaos and confusion, offered haunting visual allegories of a psycholog-
ical nether land. Based on the cinematic styles of the German Expressionists of
the 1920s, these black-and-white movies utilize dramatic lighting, harsh con-
trasts, and distorted angles to create an atmosphere of fragmented reality haunted

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by paranoia and internal torment. Characterized by disorientation and self-con-

scious alienation from the viewer, the movies often display ambivalence toward
the sexual perpetrator.
While the earlier films featured prominent Freudian symbolism, one of the
most ardent fans and influential filmmakers of the psychoanalytic perspective was
none other than the master of suspense films, Alfred Hitchcock. Several of
Hitchcock’s works, including the classics Spellbound (1946) and Psycho (1960),
practically necessitate a psychoanalytical reading by virtue of their prominent
Freudian paradigms.Themes such as the omnipresence of the mother figure, the
anal-compulsiveness of the protagonists, and the unsuccessful repression of the
illicit desire that ultimately leads to the protagonists’ own undoing, recur
throughout several films (Gordon 2008). These movies depart from the pre-
Freudian detective stories not only in terms of their portrayal of criminal motive,
but also in their attempt to link the motive to a source from the past.
In Spellbound, the so-called Dr. Edwards, the newly appointed director of a
mental asylum, is found to be an impostor with amnesia, and very quickly he is
suspected of murdering the real Dr. Edwards. Dr. Constance, the psychoanalyst
heroine in the film, is convinced otherwise, and she tries to establish his inno-
cence while falling in love with him (actual name of Ballantine). Perhaps the
most famous sequence in the film is the surreal Dali dream scene that Constance
tries to analyze in order to establish her man’s innocence, in which a huge scis-
sor is seen cutting an eye painted on a curtain. In the movie, Constance is repeat-
edly seen as a motherly figure who tries to rescue the childlike Ballantine. She
says to him, in a quote lifted almost directly from Freud:“People often feel guilty
over something they never did. It usually goes back to their childhood.The child
often wishes something terrible would happen to someone, and if something
does happen to that person, the child believes he has caused it. And he grows up
with a guilt complex over a sin that was only a child’s bad dream.” Interestingly,
Dr. Brulov, the psychiatrist mentor in the film, bears an uncanny resemblance to
Freud.
Besides the symbolism of the dream and the overt psychoanalysis reference,
Spellbound, like so many Hitchcock films, conveys an overt oedipal overtone.
Constance is depicted in the film as a mother figure, and Ballantine’s guilt over
the murder and her attempt to save him can be interpreted as his guilt over the
murder of a “missing father” and his desire for the mother figure. A similar oedi-
pal theme exists in Psycho, in which the psychiatrist at the end of the movie
reports that Norman’s mother was a “clinging and demanding woman, and for
years the two of them lived as if there was no one else in the world. Then she
met a man, and it seemed to Norman that she threw him over for this man. Now
that pushed him over the line and he killed them both.” The forbidden desire
Norman Bates held was temporarily repressed, before returning as neurosis, sub-
sequently causing a complete mental breakdown that causes him to mentally res-

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urrect his mother and ultimately to retreat into his fantasy, a refuge in which he
can be reunited with his mother (Gordon 2008).

A Mind of Its Own

Psychiatry has had a broad impact in the last two centuries on fields including
literature, art, philosophy, and medicine. Perhaps no other field within psychia-
try has had a greater influence on popular culture than psychoanalysis. Few other
fields are as synonymous with their founders, and few fields in medicine show as
much literary influence and vice versa.The concept of the human unconscious-
ness was previously addressed mostly in philosophical and literary writings, and
its development into a systematic method was very much a product of revolu-
tionizing thoughts from within the medical circle and without. Indeed, Freud
lamented that the medical circle seemed the last in accepting psychoanalysis as
bona fide scientific method.
Today, the field of psychoanalysis is no longer the fashionable theory it was in
the early 20th century. With the drive toward discovering the molecular basis of
psychiatric illness, Freudian theory has become almost passé in both medical and
popular circles. However, even at the height of its popularity, Freudian theory
conjured up feelings of both excitement and derision (Merken 2004).The field
will still have its place in the field of psychiatry, for although genetic and molec-
ular theories may open new doors for pharmacological treatments, neither one
will address patients the way psychoanalysis has done: by talking to them not as
harbingers of a disease, but as human beings experiencing turmoil from their
embattled mind.

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