ABSTRACT
Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and Henry Esmond figured brief ly in Freud’s correspondence with the Bernays sisters, but while Martha confessed herself absorbed by the former novel, we have only Ernest Jones’s assurance that Freud relished it too. But what about Anthony Trollope (1815-82)? Freud attended a talk on him, given to the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society on 22 December 1909, by Otto Rank, who focussed on Trollope’s Autobiography. Freud took this as an occasion to say that psychoanalysts should take an interest in ‘mediocre authors’, not to look for solutions of artistic problems, but for the uncovering of a ‘psychological core’. Retelling one’s ordinary daydreams, he went on, ‘would encounter only an indifference’, which writers overcame by offering their readers a ‘veiled’ revelation of the unconscious. ‘Inartistic writers’ (‘Unkünstlerische Dichter’) show up the things we are looking for in a frequently obvious way.1 Whether Freud took what he heard of Trollope’s literary production methods as a sign that he was a ‘mediocre author’ in the Haggard mould is unclear; but so far no sign has surfaced that Freud ever sampled his work for himself.
