The Life and Works of E. A. Poe: a Psychoanalytic Interpretation  

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The Life and Works of E. A. Poe: a Psychoanalytic Interpretation (1933) is a psychobiography and a psychoanalytic reading of the work of Edgar Allan Poe written by Princess Marie Bonaparte. Jacques Lacan made use of her commentary in his seminar on "The Purloined Letter."

Marie Bonaparte's thesis is that Poe's art was the product of neurosis. According to Bonaparte, Poe was a "repressed sado-masochist and necrophilist" (299). Bonaparte also claimed that Poe was impotent: "It was opium, Hervey Allen claims, which made Poe sexually impotent, since his conduct with Mary Devereaux was still entirely normal." (85) Central to her thesis that Poe was impotent is her analysis of the story "Loss of Breath."

René Laforgue, had published The Defeat of Baudelaire: A Psychoanalytical Study of the Neurosis of Charles Baudelaire with the same publisher [1].

Citations

  • "The love of pleasant smells derives from that of bad, which were originally. the good smells to the child before education repressed its pleasure in them into its opposite, disgust. This pleasure in these first odoriferous substances survives in animals, particularly in the dog, while in many people original traces remain in the predilection for strong cheeses, "high" meat and game."

References

Bonaparte, Marie. (1949). The life and works of Edgar Allan Poe, a psycho-analytic interpretation (John Rodker, Trans.). London: Imago. (Original work published 1933)



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