This book explores the influence of nineteenth-century spiritualism on the rise and practice of psychoanalysis. It demonstrates the curious affinity between the new science of the mind and Gothic fiction and film in which telepathy, hypnosis, dreaming, automatism and somnambulism can be read as metaphors for social and cultural anxieties regarding the 'occult' status of the mind in the face of speculations about the discovery of unconscious mental activities.