ABSTRACT
The speaker of this passage could easily be Sherlock Holmes describing his method to an admiring Watson.The authoritative tone of the statement is one of a master detective, secure in his penetrating knowledge. However, the final sentence’s reference to the ‘hidden recesses of the mind’ indicates that it is in fact psychological detective work that is being described; S. Freud, not S. Holmes, is the statement’s author. Freud made large claims for himself as a detective of the mind, reading closely and carefully the texts at hand. Like his fictional late nineteenth-century contemporary Sherlock Holmes, he examined the surface content of people’s remarks, and their outward appearances and gestures, to excavate the secrets hidden underneath.
