Edgar Allan Poe: Amateur Psychologist

by Brett Zimmerman

Overview

Edgar Allan Poe: Amateur Psychologist is the "first and foremost" major source of information dedicated to the theme of Poe and psychopathology. Its introduction, conclusion, chapters, and appendices highlight and employ the best insights from earlier and current scholars, but this text goes beyond them in its analysis of Poe’s relation to mainstream psychology and its rival system, phrenology. His knowledge of this subject matter is far broader and deeper than Poe specialists have hitherto supposed; his method—contrary to the "Poe myth" according to which an alcoholic, drug-addicted, tormented artist wrote to exorcise his own pathologies—was to research mental illnesses for the sake of scientific precision and verisimilitude. We also come to appreciate the interrelatedness of the psychopathologies he illustrates and other "knowledge frames," characteristic themes, featured in his tales, such as the occult, symbology, chromatography, the "cult of sensibility," Neoplatonism, and Transcendentalist epistemology. While locating Poe firmly within the science and pseudoscience of his time, Edgar Allan Poe: Amateur Psychologist simultaneously looks back from the 1830s and 40s (when Poe’s literary career was at its height) to theories and possible sources of information from the late eighteenth century, as well as forward to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to demonstrate how Poe’s theories of mind, and his depiction of psychological illnesses, occasionally anticipate modern insights and therapies. The book will be of interest not only to Poe scholars but also to students, teachers, and any intelligent reader interested in psychology, psychotherapy, and the history of ideas.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781433149221
Publisher:	Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers
Publication date:	12/05/2018
Edition description:	New
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.91(w) x 8.86(h) x (d)

About the Author

Brett Zimmerman received his BA from the University of Toronto and his MA and PhD from York University. He is Associate Professor at York University in Toronto, Canada. He has published Herman Melville: Stargazer (1998) and Edgar Allan Poe: Rhetoric and Style (2005).

Table of Contents

List of Appendices – List of Illustrations – Acknowledgements – Introduction – Deeply in Need of Therapy: Catalepsy, Monomania, and Somnambulism in “Berenice” – Poe and the Phrenologists; or, The Head Masters of “Bumpology” – Method in His “Madness”: The Narrator of “Ligeia” – Sensibility, Phrenology, and Allegory: “The Fall of the House of Usher” – Why Will You Say That I Am Mad? : Schizophrenia in “The Tell-Tale Heart” – The Devil Made Me Do It: Religious Mania in “The Black Cat” – Flooding, Phobias, and Psychosomatics: “The Premature Burial” – “Impulsive Insanity”: “The Imp of the Perverse” and the High Place Phenomenon – Back to Bedlam: The Moral Treatment in “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” – Diagnosing Genius: Dupin and the Bipartite or Tripartite Theory of Mind – Conclusion – Index.

Editorial Reviews

"Edgar Allan Poe: Amateur Psychologist provides fascinating insight into Poe’s knowledge of the incipient fields of psychology and psychotherapy, sparking his creation of unforgettable narrators. Charting Poe’s evolving responses to phrenology and examining his acquaintance with mid-nineteenth-century mainstream theories and treatments of derangement, from monomania to schizophrenia to phobias, Brett Zimmerman offers brilliant analyses of Poe’s most memorable tales. The text is a seminal work for assessing Poe’s reactions to ideas about mental illness circulating during his lifetime." —Dr. Lynne Shackelford, Professor of English, Furman University

From the Publisher