SOURCE: Jay, Gregory S. “Poe: Writing and the Unconscious.” In The American Renaissance: New Dimensions, edited by Harry R. Garvin and Peter C. Carafiol, pp. 144-69. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1983.

In the following essay, Jay discusses the discourse of sexuality, philosophy, and textuality in the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe.

Can the dispossession of consciousness to the profit of another home of meaning be understood as an act of reflection, as the first gesture of reappropriation?

—Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy

But human megalomania will have suffered its third and most wounding blow from the psychological research of the present time which seeks to prove to the ego that it is not even master of its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in its mind. We psychoanalysts were not the first and not the only ones to...