Romantic Psychoanalysis

The Burden of the Mystery

Joel Faflak

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780791472705, 9780791472699
• eBook ISBN: 9780791479223
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

How the Romantics invented psychoanalysis in advance of Freud.

In this provocative work, Joel Faflak argues that Romanticism, particularly British Romantic poetry, invents psychoanalysis in advance of Freud. The Romantic period has long been treated as a time of incipient psychological exploration anticipating more sophisticated discoveries in the science of the mind. Romantic Psychoanalysis challenges this assumption by treating psychoanalysis in the Romantic period as a discovery unto itself, a way of taking Freud back to his future. Reading Romantic literature against eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophy, Faflak contends that Romantic poetry and prose-including works by Coleridge, De Quincey, Keats, and Wordsworth-remind a later psychoanalysis of its fundamental matrix in phantasy and thus of its profoundly literary nature.

Table of contents

• Romantic Psychoanalysis
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• ABBREVIATIONS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THEROMANTIC SUBJECT
• 2. ANALYSIS TERMINABLE IN WORDSWORTH
• 3. ANALYSIS TERMINABLE IN COLERIDGE
• 4. DE QUINCEY TERMINABLE AND INTERMINABLE
• 5. KEATS AND THE BURDEN OF INTERMINABILITY
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX