The Gothic production of the unconscious

Abstract

In Dracula a new theory of unconscious mental activity called ‘unconscious cerebration’ is mentioned twice. Unlike other modern theories of the mind which the novel makes a point of citing, unconscious cerebration is referred to only in passing and in connection with the madman Renfield and his psychiatrist Dr Seward rather than the eponymous villain of the text. Where psychologists and criminologists, Jean Charcot, Max Nordau and Cesare Lombroso in particular, are named and their theories employed in the classification and exorcism of the vampiric threat, unconscious cerebration remains in the background, contemporary scientific furniture in a novel obsessed with the limits of fin-de-siecle modernity. Unremarkable, it is as if the unconscious has always been there.