{"id":{"repo_id":"whiterose","oai_identifier":"oai:etheses.whiterose.ac.uk:1227"},"canonical_url":"https://search.dev.ndltd.org/etd/whiterose/oai:etheses.whiterose.ac.uk:1227","repository":{"repo_id":"whiterose","name":"White Rose University Consortium","base_url":"https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/cgi/oai2"},"display":{"title":"Symptomatic writings: prefigurations of Freudian theories and models of the mind in the fiction of Sheridan Le Fanu, Wilkie Collins and George Eliot","abstract":"This thesis examines ways in which the writings of Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873), Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) and George Eliot (1819-1880) anticipate aspects of the works of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). It argues that psychoanalytic theories were a product of their time, finding their ancestry in Victorian psychological, philosophical, scientific and social thought, aspects of which also informed the work of Le Fanu, Collins and Eliot. I foreground Freud's work of the 1890s, especially his Project for a Scientific Psychology (1950; written in 1895), the forerunner of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), The Unconscious (1915), Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and The Ego and the Id (1923). The energy-filled psychical system the Project outlines is informed by nineteenth-century ideas on force. I discuss systemic equilibrium in Le Fanu's short stories, the tendency to inertia in Eliot's Romola (1862-3) and the mechanics of satisfaction in Middlemarch (1871-2) and Daniel Deronda (1876); all these concepts find roots in nineteenth-or pre-nineteenth-century spiritual or scientific thought, and prefigure Freud's Project. The association of ideas, a basic foundation of psychoanalysis, is discussed with reference to Collins's Basil (1852), The Woman in White (1860), No Name (1862) and Armadale (1866). I suggest how Collins's knowledge of the work of W. B. Carpenter (1813-1885) and Frances Power Cobbe (1822-1904), and Eliot's engagement with the ideas of George Henry Lewes (1817-1878) and Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) are evident in their fictions. Throughout, I show that unconscious mental processes were discussed decades before Freud.","abstract_html":"This thesis examines ways in which the writings of Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873), Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) and George Eliot (1819-1880) anticipate aspects of the works of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). It argues that psychoanalytic theories were a product of their time, finding their ancestry in Victorian psychological, philosophical, scientific and social thought, aspects of which also informed the work of Le Fanu, Collins and Eliot. I foreground Freud's work of the 1890s, especially his Project for a Scientific Psychology (1950; written in 1895), the forerunner of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), The Unconscious (1915), Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and The Ego and the Id (1923). The energy-filled psychical system the Project outlines is informed by nineteenth-century ideas on force. I discuss systemic equilibrium in Le Fanu's short stories, the tendency to inertia in Eliot's Romola (1862-3) and the mechanics of satisfaction in Middlemarch (1871-2) and Daniel Deronda (1876); all these concepts find roots in nineteenth-or pre-nineteenth-century spiritual or scientific thought, and prefigure Freud's Project. The association of ideas, a basic foundation of psychoanalysis, is discussed with reference to Collins's Basil (1852), The Woman in White (1860), No Name (1862) and Armadale (1866). I suggest how Collins's knowledge of the work of W. B. Carpenter (1813-1885) and Frances Power Cobbe (1822-1904), and Eliot's engagement with the ideas of George Henry Lewes (1817-1878) and Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) are evident in their fictions. Throughout, I show that unconscious mental processes were discussed decades before Freud.","abstract_has_math":false,"creators":["Tingle, Catherine Mary"],"institution":"University of Leeds","degree_name":"Ph.D","degree_level":"doctoral","degree_discipline":null,"degree_department":null,"school":null,"contributors":[],"advisors":["Marshall, G.","Woods, J."],"committee_chairs":[],"committee_members":[],"year":2000,"date_issued":"2000-09","date_published":"2000-09","updated_at":"2026-07-24T06:04:19Z","subjects":[],"languages":[],"rights":[],"rights_urls":[],"identifier_entries":[{"key":"dc:identifier","label":"Identifier","values":["uk.bl.ethos.527549"],"render_values":[{"text":"uk.bl.ethos.527549","href":null,"code":true}]}]},"links":{"outbound_url":null,"outbound_label":null,"outbound_source":null},"metadata_groups":[{"id":"people","label":"People","entries":[{"key":"dc:contributor.advisor","label":"Advisor","values":["Marshall, G.","Woods, J."]},{"key":"dc:creator","label":"Author","values":["Tingle, Catherine Mary"]}]},{"id":"academic_context","label":"Academic Context","entries":[{"key":"dc:date","label":"Dc Date","values":["2000-09"]},{"key":"dc:date.issued","label":"Date","values":["2000-09"]},{"key":"dc:publisher.commercial","label":"Dc Publisher Commercial","values":["University of Leeds"]},{"key":"dc:publisher.department","label":"Dc Publisher Department","values":["School of English (Leeds)"]},{"key":"dc:publisher.institution","label":"Dc Publisher Institution","values":["University of Leeds"]},{"key":"dc:relation.isreferencedby","label":"Dc Relation Isreferencedby","values":["https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/1227/"]},{"key":"dc:type","label":"Dc Type","values":["Thesis"]},{"key":"dc:type.qualificationlevel","label":"Dc Type Qualificationlevel","values":["doctoral"]},{"key":"dc:type.qualificationname","label":"Dc Type Qualificationname","values":["Ph.D"]}]},{"id":"identifiers","label":"Identifiers","entries":[{"key":"dc:identifier","label":"Identifier","values":["uk.bl.ethos.527549"]},{"key":"dc:identifier.uri","label":"Identifier URI","values":["https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/1227/1/uk_bl_ethos_525614.pdf"]}]},{"id":"additional","label":"Additional Metadata","entries":[{"key":"dc:description.abstract","label":"Abstract","values":["This thesis examines ways in which the writings of Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873), Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) and George Eliot (1819-1880) anticipate aspects of the works of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). It argues that psychoanalytic theories were a product of their time, finding their ancestry in Victorian psychological, philosophical, scientific and social thought, aspects of which also informed the work of Le Fanu, Collins and Eliot. I foreground Freud's work of the 1890s, especially his Project for a Scientific Psychology (1950; written in 1895), the forerunner of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), The Unconscious (1915), Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and The Ego and the Id (1923). The energy-filled psychical system the Project outlines is informed by nineteenth-century ideas on force. I discuss systemic equilibrium in Le Fanu's short stories, the tendency to inertia in Eliot's Romola (1862-3) and the mechanics of satisfaction in Middlemarch (1871-2) and Daniel Deronda (1876); all these concepts find roots in nineteenth-or pre-nineteenth-century spiritual or scientific thought, and prefigure Freud's Project. The association of ideas, a basic foundation of psychoanalysis, is discussed with reference to Collins's Basil (1852), The Woman in White (1860), No Name (1862) and Armadale (1866). I suggest how Collins's knowledge of the work of W. B. Carpenter (1813-1885) and Frances Power Cobbe (1822-1904), and Eliot's engagement with the ideas of George Henry Lewes (1817-1878) and Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) are evident in their fictions. Throughout, I show that unconscious mental processes were discussed decades before Freud."]},{"key":"dc:format","label":"Dc Format","values":["text"]},{"key":"dc:title","label":"Title","values":["Symptomatic writings: prefigurations of Freudian theories and models of the mind in the fiction of Sheridan Le Fanu, Wilkie Collins and George Eliot"]}]}],"canonical_facts":{"dc:contributor.advisor":["Marshall, G.","Woods, J."],"dc:creator":["Tingle, Catherine Mary"],"dc:date":["2000-09"],"dc:date.issued":["2000-09"],"dc:description.abstract":["This thesis examines ways in which the writings of Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873), Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) and George Eliot (1819-1880) anticipate aspects of the works of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). It argues that psychoanalytic theories were a product of their time, finding their ancestry in Victorian psychological, philosophical, scientific and social thought, aspects of which also informed the work of Le Fanu, Collins and Eliot. I foreground Freud's work of the 1890s, especially his Project for a Scientific Psychology (1950; written in 1895), the forerunner of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), The Unconscious (1915), Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and The Ego and the Id (1923). The energy-filled psychical system the Project outlines is informed by nineteenth-century ideas on force. I discuss systemic equilibrium in Le Fanu's short stories, the tendency to inertia in Eliot's Romola (1862-3) and the mechanics of satisfaction in Middlemarch (1871-2) and Daniel Deronda (1876); all these concepts find roots in nineteenth-or pre-nineteenth-century spiritual or scientific thought, and prefigure Freud's Project. The association of ideas, a basic foundation of psychoanalysis, is discussed with reference to Collins's Basil (1852), The Woman in White (1860), No Name (1862) and Armadale (1866). I suggest how Collins's knowledge of the work of W. B. Carpenter (1813-1885) and Frances Power Cobbe (1822-1904), and Eliot's engagement with the ideas of George Henry Lewes (1817-1878) and Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) are evident in their fictions. Throughout, I show that unconscious mental processes were discussed decades before Freud."],"dc:format":["text"],"dc:identifier":["uk.bl.ethos.527549"],"dc:identifier.uri":["https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/1227/1/uk_bl_ethos_525614.pdf"],"dc:publisher.commercial":["University of Leeds"],"dc:publisher.department":["School of English (Leeds)"],"dc:publisher.institution":["University of Leeds"],"dc:relation.isreferencedby":["https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/1227/"],"dc:title":["Symptomatic writings: prefigurations of Freudian theories and models of the mind in the fiction of Sheridan Le Fanu, Wilkie Collins and George Eliot"],"dc:type":["Thesis"],"dc:type.qualificationlevel":["doctoral"],"dc:type.qualificationname":["Ph.D"]},"updated_at":"2026-07-24T06:04:19Z"}