Description
This study, originally published in 1933 in a French edition, has now been made available to the English-speaking world. The translation by Mr. Rodker is, on the whole, admirably lucid and elegant. There is a brief, austere foreword by Freud in which he refers to Marie Bonaparte as “my friend and pupil”.
“Thanks to her interpretative effort”, he continues, “we now realize how many of the characteristics of Poe’s works were conditioned by his personality, and can see how that personality derived from intense emotional fixations and painful infantile experiences. Investigations such as this do not claim to explain creative genius, but they do reveal the factors which awaken it and the sort of subject matter it is destined to choose.”
