“A Case of History.” A Review of The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas

That psychoanalysis owes a great deal to literature and philosophy is by now a commonplace. Students of literature are apt to be more familiar with Oedipus according to Freud, or Hamlet through Ernest Jones, than with the actual works of Sophocles and Shakespeare. Indeed, it is difficult to think of Oedipus without some sort of “complex” springing to mind, or Hamlet without some sort of reference to Oedipus. Freud's formulations of his adventures in the unconscious have now seeped into ours, and the fact that his psychological insights have become part of our everyday vocabulary is a testament to their power and lasting appeal.

Freud, of course, was one of the first to acknowledge his debt. It was hearing Goethe's essay on Nature, he wrote (Freud, 1925, p. 8), that prompted his decision to become a medical student, and he was quick to disclaim, on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, his title as the “discoverer of the unconscious”. “The poets and philosophers”, he replied, “discovered