Psychology emerged as a discipline in the second half of the nineteenth century, predating and forming the intellectual context for psychoanalysis and continuing to develop in tandem with it, although its cultural impact has arguably been less strong. The dominance of psychoanalysis in twentieth-and twenty-first-century culture has been such that, as Perry Meisel argues, ‘Freud's work has itself become an example of those unconscious determinations that influence us when we least suspect it.’ As he also suggests, Freud's work can be seen as a set of imaginative texts in which the concept of the unconscious is itself a trope, a literary rather than a scientific device, grounded in an approach to language which seals the thematic and ‘technical’ affinities between literature and psychoanalysis. More pertinently for Katherine Mansfield, many critics have argued for the mutual imbrication of psychoanalysis and modernist literature, with Stephen Frosh contending that ‘psychoanalysis, at least in its pre-World War II form, is an emblematic modernist discipline; conversely, modernist perceptions of subjectivity, individuality, memory and sociality are all deeply entwined with a psychoanalytic sensitivity.’ Yet it is also the case that modernist writers are creatures of the nineteenth as much as the twentieth century, given that their formative influences usually date back to the earlier century. In Mansfield's case, as Sydney Janet Kaplan has shown, the writing of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde had a major impact on her understanding of gender, genre and the dynamics of consciousness. There are several allusions to Pater and Wilde in Mansfield's early notebooks and no comparable references to specific works of psychology; none the less, in 1908 we find her thinking about a projected story in terms which meld Pater's Lockean impressionism with the language of psychology when she writes, ‘I should like to write a life very much in the style of Walter Pater's ‘Child in the House’ […] A story, no it would be a sketch, hardly that, more a psychological study of the most erudite character.’ The term ‘psychological’ almost certainly refers not to Freud but to the wider network of psychological theories that pre-dated and enabled his work, which included evolutionary psychology, Wilhelm Wundt's experimental psychology and the dynamic psychology of William James. Despite wide differences between them, what these early psychologists shared was a materialist perspective which emphasised the intricate interrelation of the mind and body.