Nero Wolfe and the mind’s unconscious mode of being

Abstract

Commonly, we encounter events, we read newspapers, essays, novels, we watch stories told in movies, we live emotional experiences within our relationships. Sometimes it happens to reread these experiences using other categories than those suggested by the event itself. We think that re-reading some experiences by using psychoanalytic categories will help to look at them in a new way. It also helps to use psychoanalytic categories in a new, less scholastic, more engaging way. In this work, we have “re-read” Rex Stout’s mystery books, starring investigator Nero Wolfe, by using the constitutive categories of the mind’s unconscious mode of being. We have found some invariants in the events that take place within the brownstone house where Wolfe permanently lives – only very rarely moving from the house itself – as opposed to the variability of the “mystery” events, variable part of the novel. We have proposed an analysis of these invariant and variable components, using the category: internal-external world of the mind and unconscious dynamics.