The Brain-Mind in the Confessions, Literary Criticism, and Suspiria

Abstract

De Quincey’s most famous autobiographical accounts treat his opium addiction, dreams, and memory in a way that highlights the role of the body in mental processes and defines the unconscious in relation to the physical frame, in particular the nerves and the brain. In some of his first written records, he discusses the connection between the body and the mind. In the 1803 diary, at the age of seventeen, he ponders the body/mind interaction explicitly: ‘The intimate connection, which {tear} body and the mind, has never (to my knowledge) been sufficiently enlarged on in theory or insisted on in practise. To shew the ultimate cause of this … would (in) be very difficult though not (I think) impossible’ (WTDQ 1: 12). Three years later, De Quincey jotted down a list entitled ‘Constituents of Happiness’. The first of these constituents is a ‘capacity of thinking — i.e. of abstraction and reverie’ (WTDQ 1: 72), a faculty he doubtlessly had and continued to cultivate throughout his life. ‘Health and vigor’ (WTDQ 1: 72), the seventh item on the list, was not within his reach, partly at least because he did not possess what he lists under the eighth article: ‘mastery … over all appetites’ (WTDQ 1: 73).¹

The human body is not the dress or apparel of the human spirit; far more mysterious is the mode of their union. Call the two elements A and B: then it is impossible to point out A as existing aloof from B, or vice versa. A exists in and through B. B exists in and through A.

Thomas De Quincey ‘On the Present Stage of the English Language’