Towards a pre-history of the unconscious : madness, drugs, and dream in nineteenth-century French culture, 1821-1877

This thesis examines the emerging concept of the unconscious mind in nineteenth-century psychiatric (alienist) and literary texts in Prance between 1821 and 1877. Its central objective is to reassess the relationship between alienist and literary discourses within the clearly defined contours of this concept, but without either imposing the structure of the psychoanalytic unconscious onto works to which this is alien, or reading pre-Freudian texts as though they revealed the 'Unconscious' - timeless and unchanging - hiding beneath another name.