SOURCE: Rosenheim, Shawn. “Detective Fiction, Psychoanalysis, and the Analytic Sublime.” In The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman, pp. 153-76. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Rosenheim explores the nature and function of analysis and psychoanalysis in Poe's detective stories.

“We have gone so far as to combine the ideas of an agility astounding, a strength superhuman, a ferocity brutal, a butchery without motive, a grotesquerie in horror absolutely alien from humanity, and a voice foreign in tone to the ears of men of many nations, and devoid of all distinct or intelligible syllabification. … What impression have I made upon your fancy?” I felt a creeping of the flesh as Dupin asked me the question. “A madman,” I said, “has done this deed—some raving maniac escaped from a neighboring Maison de Santé.”

—Edgar Allan Poe, “The...