ABSTRACT
The nineteenth-century bourgeois novel and psychoanalytic theory exist in a symbiotic relationship with one another. The familial tensions which the fictions articulate, negotiate and plot are the site for the development of Freud’s own hypotheses; the terms in which he set up his case histories, his notation of dialogue, his sense of drama and of the transformative power of language in turn being meditated by established narrative forms. Seductive in their similarity to Freud’s scenarios, the personal dynamics contained in these novels have repeatedly been scrutinized by means of a range of psychoanalytically based approaches.
