Towards a Freudian Theory of Literature is the second essay in what Francesco Orlando called the “Freudian cycle”: four books published between 1971 and 1982 and republished in three volumes between 1990 and 1992 under the collective title Literature, Reason, Repressed. This dense and rigorous book illustrates the assumptions of the project and is very different in character from the others, which are variously calibrated on the empirical analysis of literary works. As Orlando is keen to point out, what emerges from the texts collected here is not a theory, but a proposal for a theory: a theory in motion, in which ideas are presented as if they were thought processes, according to a technique that the author calls ‘heuristic suspense’ and of which Freud’s writings are the supreme model.