Figures of the Pre-Freudian Unconscious from Flaubert to Proust

Michael R. Finn is Emeritus Professor of French in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Ryerson University in Toronto. He has written widely on the connection between literature and medicine including the books Proust, the Body and Literary Form (Cambridge, 1999) and Hysteria, Hypnotism, the Spirits and Pornography (2009), as well as an extensive range of articles.

• 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.

'Clear and precise in its arguments, Finn's book draws illuminatingly on an impressive range of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sources, from medical treatises and theses, medical and cultural history to writers' correspondence, biography, literary fiction, reception studies and literary criticism. Finn has produced a book that enlivens our thinking and enriches our understanding of the place of pre-Freudian unconscious during a period when developments in medicine, psychology and psychiatry in France were informing and being reflected in creative writing of various sorts.' Adam Watt, University of Exeter