ABSTRACT
Two figures in particular can help one trace the interlocking developments in psychoanalysis, the historical sciences, and literary detection: Sigmund Freud and William Godwin. The model of detection that Freud offers as an example of how to read the mind's "history" turns out to conform to the hermeneutics of imaginative "romance" or fiction, just like his "bilingual", "self-explanatory" model of archaeological interpretation. Freud's "talking cure" partly conforms to this early historiographical model of narrative analepsis, wherein the patient's conscious tale of his or her present and past life betrays the unconscious traces of a pre-narrative trauma. Godwin, like Freud, evinced an apparent preference for the transparent literary hermeneutics of "romance" or fiction over the perceived uncertainties of "historicist" reconstructions of the past. In his essay, "romance" seems at first to offer Godwin an attractive method by which to construct sympathetic personalities that could, hopefully, inspire emulation and the desire to change the politically oppressive realities of "things as they are".
