Download or read book Method in Madness written by Jutta Emma Fortin and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2005 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The language of the fantastic left its mark upon many different thinkers in 19th-century Europe. Marx's comparison of consumer goods to fetish objects, works by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam or other novelists about machines that assume lives of their own, or the diagnoses of psychological illness offered by doctors in Maupassant's tales all blur the lines between scientific description and beliefs in the magical. Building upon a wealth of critical studies devoted to the fantastic and upon Freud's theory of the unconscious, Jutta Fortin proposes that many classic stories of the fantastic undermine basic psychological mechanisms that are designed to help their users cope with shocking or disturbing events. By defining five of these defence mechanisms, and analyzing stories by eight writers that both illustrate and subvert such mechanisms, Dr. Fortin offers reasons why fantastic stories appealed to those readers who wished to better understand human motivations."--BOOK JACKET.