2 - A Dream Within a Dream: Poe and Psychoanalysis

Summary

There has never been much doubt that something was very much the matter with Edgar Allan Poe.

— Philip Young (1951)

IN 1909, the year Poe was celebrated as a great American and a true Southerner at centennial celebrations in Charlottesville and Baltimore, Sigmund Freud visited the United States; as he arrived in New York, Freud is reported to have remarked to Carl Jung, “They don't realize we're bringing them the plague” (Gallop 58). Indeed, in 1909 few Americans were aware of the revolutionary theories that would “plague” their faith in human rationality and self-control, although over the course of the decade following Freud's visit his theories would make their way not only into scholarly journals but also, in somewhat distorted and popularized forms, into Good Housekeeping and The Ladies' Home Journal (Morrison 27). One could argue, though, that Americans never did see “Freudianism” as a plague, despite the controversy it generated; while psychoanalysis took root as a profession, for the laity Freud's theories could be translated as a rationale for liberation from sexual repression and guilt (Dumenil 146). Almost immediately literary writers and critics began to incorporate Freud's ideas into their work. As we have seen, most commentary on Poe in the nineteenth century was concerned with biography and character assessment, sometimes with a psychological emphasis on Poe's alleged insanity or a more specific diagnosis such as “cerebral epilepsy” (Fairchild 691).