Method in Madness looks at the ways in which nineteenth-century French literature of the fantastic reflected what psychoanalysis would later define as mechanisms of defence. Each chapter of the book is dedicated to a particular mechanism - fetishization, projection, intellectualization, mechanization, and compulsion - and to a representative set of texts which illustrate and embody the process concerned. The book thus systematizes what has remained up to now a rather vague perception of the psychological processes at work in fantastic narrative and of the relationship between the fantastic...
Method in Madness looks at the ways in which nineteenth-century French literature of the fantastic reflected what psychoanalysis would later define as...