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This paper explores the occult relationship between modern psychoanalysis and the pre-Freudian psychoanalysis of James Hogg‘s 1824 Gothic novel, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Haunted by the ghosts of Mesmerism and of Calvinisms rabidly contagious religious fervour, Hogg‘s novel explodes post-Lockean paradigms of the subject for a post-Romantic British culture on the eve of the Empire. Turning back to Scotland‘s turbulent political and religious history, the novel looks forward to the problems of Empire by turning Locke‘s sense-making and sensible subject into the subject of an unconscious ripe for ideological exploitation, a subject mesmerized by the process of making sense of himself.
Hundred Years , ed. William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988 ), pp. 161–207; “Stoker’s counterfeit gothic: Dracula and theatricality at the dawn of simulation,” Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis and the Gothic , ed. William Hughes and Andrew Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), pp. 205