Abstract In 1901, fingerprinting was first implemented by Scotland Yard for the purposes of criminal identification. Recording identity in the imprint left by a body's digits allowed for the identification of individuals on a mass scale, 'fixing' their identity with apparently incontrovertible certainty. But in this essay it will be argued that the fingerprint also served as an example of a much more enigmatic and 'impressionistic' identity that was shared by the discourses of two contemporary figures - Sigmund Freud and Joseph Conrad. In the development of psychoanalysis, particularly around the turn of the twentieth century in texts such as Studies on Hysteria (1895) and The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud continually utilised the notion of the 'impression' to articulate his ideas, promoting theories that had a profound effect on how identity could be conceptualised. Likewise, the novel Lord Jim (1900) serves as a prime example of Conrad's Literary Impressionism: a style of writing self-consciously created as a response to a novelistic realism that failed to capture the essence of lived experience. In lifting prints, analyzing traces and reading impressions the discourses examined in this essay all display a dominating concern with the unintentional, the fragmentary and the imaginary, all of which had to be enhanced, analysed and represented by authoritative experts who could make the layman see true identity.Keywords fingerprints, Freud, Conrad, psychoanalysis, literary impressionism, identification, identityIt was not important that things be beautiful [for the impressionist]; what he sought to discover was their identity - the signs by which he should know them.Henry James, 'A New England Winter'INTRODUCTIONIn 1901 the first United Kingdom Fingerprint Bureau was founded in Scotland Yard. It was a moment which represented the culmination of a rapid rise in the science of fingerprinting, which had taken place in the diverse locations of Japan, British India and Argentina. Recording identity in the imprint left by a body's digits allowed for the apparently incontrovertible identification of individuals on a mass scale. In one sense this was a further landmark in the modern drive towards a state-exercised dominance over 'docile bodies' and marked the continued penetration of surveillance culture into individual experience: to a point where it inhered in the very skin of the subject.1Yet, what will be argued in this essay is something rather different: namely, that the image which a fingerprint makes on an identity card, and the practice by which these imprints are identified, represent less a biologically determined, and completely certain, identity, so much as an impressionistic identity. The cultural specificity of this in fin de siecle Europe - the fact that identity was, at the time, being considered in ways fundamentally bound up with conceptions of the impression - will be demonstrated by juxtaposing the historical development of fingerprinting with two seemingly unconnected disciplines. Firstly, Sigmund Freud's work, as it took early form in texts such as Studies on Hysteria (1895) and The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) is one in which the 'impression' (Eindruck) abounds, signifying, amongst other things, ordinary perception, the forgotten, though lasting, trace of traumatic events, the effect made by particular phrases and bodily demeanours - it even serves as a validation of Freud's own interpretative work. Like the fingerprint, which identified the event in which a digit was pressed onto a surface, psychoanalysis, especially in its early incarnation at the turn of the century, identified an event (the traumatic scene), albeit one whose objective reality was doubtful. Just as significantly, the complexity of latent meaning contained in the smallest unit (impression) of conscious experience mirrored the intricate weaving of ridges and valleys represented in the momentary touch of the finger: a trace invisible to the naked eye but 'lifted' from its object by the expert analyst. …