Figures of the Pre-Freudian Unconscious from Flaubert to Proust
Cambridge University Press, 7/25/2017
EAN 9781107184565, ISBN10: 1107184568
Hardcover, 250 pages, 23.5 x 15.8 x 1.8 cm
Language: English
An original, wide-ranging contribution to the study of French writing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this book examines the ways in which the unconscious was understood in literature in the years before Freud. Exploring the influence of medical and psychological discourse over the existence and/or potential nature of the unconscious, Michael R. Finn discusses the resistance of feminists opposing medical diagnoses of the female brain as the seat of the unconscious, the hypnotism craze of the 1880s and the fascination, in fiction, with dual personality and posthypnotic crimes. The heart of the study explores how the unconscious inserts itself into the writing practice of Flaubert, Maupassant and Proust. Through the presentation of scientific evidence and quarrels about the psyche, Michael R. Finn is able to show the work of such writers in a completely new light.
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I. Before Freud
The Quarrel of the Unconscious in Late Nineteenth-Century France
1. Reflex action, unconscious cerebration, subliminal self
2. The double brain and cerebral topography
3. Hallucination and hypnotism
4. The quarrel of the unconscious
5. The French unconscious, Janet and Freud
Part II. Flaubert
Hysterical Duality, Hallucination and Writing
6. The divided writer
7. Flaubert bi-gendered
8. Hector Landouzy, Salammbô and hysteria
9. The critics and Flaubert's divided self
10. Absorption, hallucination, writing stance
Part III. Maupassant, Charcot and the Paranormal
11. Charcot, Le Horla and ambient psychic research
12. 'Les magnétiseurs'
Pickmann vs Donato
13. Dualities and doubles
14. Figuring the Maupassantian unconscious
Part IV. The Unconscious Female/The Female Unconscious
15. Fictions of female physiology
16. The late-century female brain and education
17. Four female writers on the female brain
18. Femme fatale, femme inconsciente
Part V. Hypnotism, Dual Personalities and the Popular Novel
19. Experimental crimes, real crimes
20. Dual personality, hypnotism and the French fin-de-siècle novel
21. Sex, hypnotism and the unconscious
22. A more sophisticated unconscious?
Part VI. Proust, the Intellect and the Unconscious
23. Trials of the intellect
24. The unconscious and creativity
1900
25. The 'natural' unconscious
Proust and Maeterlinck
26. Toward the Proustian unconscious
26.A Willpower and the creative
26.B Unconscious anticipation
26.C Deep, behind, within
articulating the unconscious
Postscript
Notes
Bibliography
Index.