What does Sigmund Freud have to do with magic and cartomancy? Surprisingly much, Bent Sørensen argues, while looking at five key Freudian insights and applying them to the ways of and reasons for reading cards and performing magic.

Gordon’s nine essays explore the literary reception of Freud in various contexts. They study the connection of his psychoanalysis to: the concepts of tragedy and comedy; to literary criticism as represented by Harold Bloom; the cognitive challenge of his (and Darwin’s) major theories; the competition between his concept of depth and that of certain novelists; the concept of memory illustrated in Proust and cognitive neuroscience; the imagining of one’s own death represented by post-Enlightenment poetry; the interpretation of “Hamlet”; Nietzsche’s idea of “the good European”; and, finally, to what a cultural perspective can contribute in assessing the value of psychoanalysis today.