"Look Into the Mirror. What Do You See?" Edgar Allan Poe Unveiling Man's Dark Half

This paper deals with Poe's short stories "The Imp of the Perverse", "The Black Cat" and "The Tell-Tale Heart" from the point of view of psychoanalysis and the psychology of depths. Instead of analyzing Poe himself by the means of his stories (as others have done before - a method which has been criticized since), we opt for an analysis of the texts and relate Poe's (or his protagonists') "Spirit of Perverseness" with psychological concepts such as Freud's "death drive" and C.G. Jung's "shadow". In this manner we throw new light on a so far neglected concept of Poe's work and set it in an anthropological frame