Romantic Psyche and Psychoanalysis

"Romantic Psyche and Psychoanalysis" offers a series of shifting perspectives on the emergence of psychoanalysis and a psychoanalytical consciousness in early and later British and German Romantic poetry, fiction, philosophy, and science. Rather than read psychoanalysis as one of Romanticism's inevitable outcomes, this volume reads for what remains unthought between Romantic thought and contemporary theory and criticism about Romanticism and psychoanalysis. The papers herein map versions of a psychoanalysis avant la lettre, but more crucially these essays imagine how psychoanalysis before Freud thinks itself differently, as well as anticipating and staging its later concerns, theorizations, and institutionalizations. Together they offer what might be called the profoundly psychosomatic matrix within which the specters of modern subjectivity materialize themselves.