In the movie The Seven Per Cent Solution, Sigmund Freud and Sherlock Holmes join forces in a rather improbable series of adventures.  In our seminar, these two legendary figures will meet again: Freud, detective of the unconscious, and Holmes, investigator of the dark, criminal, side of human nature—the first, a historical character who has entered the popular imagination, often as demonic genius; the latter, a fictional character so well known that he is often taken for real.

Apart from their love of cocaine, Holmes and Freud share a style of reasoning, a “method” that will be the focus of our investigation.  It consists of assigning great significance to circumstantial evidence gathered from “the rubbish-heap . . . of our observations” and through “backward reasoning,” from consequence to cause, bringing it together in a coherent narrative:  the history of a crime or of a neurosis.

The great success of the detective genre, some critics have asserted, is that it forms a secular mythology, professing the presence of a superior order behind the chaos of appearances.  In a similar way, the power of Freudian psychoanalysis lies not in its purported “scientificity” but in its mythopoeic imagination. George Steiner rightly called Freud “one of the great mythologists, one of the great writers and imaginers of an arching metaphor of ordering myth and ritual.”

Bringing these two figures together will allow us to cast a look, at once sympathetic and critical, at the implications and very real effects of what one author has called their “mythod.”  We will read a selection of Conan Doyle’s masterful Sherlock Holmes stories and of Freud’s ingenuous case studies in which the psychoanalyst dons the deerstalker.  The very titles of these case studies—“The Rat Man,” “The Wolf Man,” “Anna O,” “Little Hans,” “Dora”—breathe Sherlockian intrigue and suspense. 

Frequent informal writing will be required.  To be more intimately involved with the problems we are discussing, we will keep a dream journal and write our own detective story or fictionalized case study.  Each student will give two short presentations, one on a movie (there will be regular screenings) and one on a fictional spin-off on Freud or Sherlock Holmes by authors such as D.M. Thomas, Tom Stoppard, Helene Cixous, Anthony Burgess, or Terry Johnson. 

To be prepared for this class, you should be a junior or a senior and have taken upper-level literature classes. You should also keep in mind that we will be reading not just detective stories and psycho-analytic case studies, but also much theory and criticism.  The course offers an introduction to semiotics, structuralism, poststructuralism, and narratology. Critical perspectives will involve psychoanalytic, feminist, Marxist, and deconstructivist strategies. While you do not need any advance preparation in theory, you do have to be interested in learning it.  You should be able and willing to read 150 to 250 pages a week and to attend film screenings on Thursday evenings. You should also be aware that some of the movies are unrated or X-rated and contain potentially offensive or disturbing images. 

Apart from the Sherlock Holmes stories and case studies referred to here above, readings will probably include some of the following fiction and drama: Voltaire, “The Dog and the Horse” (from Zadig); Vidocq, “The Clue of the Paper Scrap”; Poe, “The Purloined Letter”; Stoppard, After Magritte and The Real Inspector Hound; D.M. Thomas, The White Hotel or Eating Pavlova; and Johnson Hysteria. 

We will read criticism and theory by, among others, Michel Foucault, Umberto Eco, Todorov, Moretti, Jakobson, Young-Bruehl, Horney, and Deleuze and Guattari. 

Movies may include the following: Sidney Lanfield, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939); Gene Wilder, The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother (1975); Peter Hammond, The Eligible Bachelor; Herbert Ross, The Seven Per Cent Solution (1976); Hitchcock, Spellbound (1945), Psycho (1960), or Marnie (1964); Dusan Makaveyev, WR—Mysteries of the Organism (1971); Neil Jordan, A Company of Wolves (1984); Lars von Trier,  The Element of Crime (1984); Antony McCall et al., Sigmund Freud’s Dora: A Case of Mistaken Identity (1976); Andrei Zagdansky’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1990); George Sluizer, The Vanishing (1988).

This course requires the instructor's authorization.  Please fill out the questionnaire that is available from the secretary of the English Department, Ms. Kozash, in Pierce Hall.