This interdisciplinary study of Edgar Allen Poe and Sigmund Freud is concerned with the parallel themes which they explore in their work and the relationship of those themes to the processes of creativity, analysis and the fantastic as found in the Romantic imagination in crisis. It centres on the Romantic obsession (as exemplified in literature by Poe and in psychology by Freud) with the tracing of meaning through a pathological concern with the compulsive, daemonic and hidden nature of the creative act.

Utilising the critical practice of contemporary literary theory, the book is not only a concentrated study of the work of two major authors but also a reconsideration and development of contemporary theory toward the creative moment.