Psychoanalysis can be understood as a realisation of the theatrical aesthetics of melodrama, offering an acting out of psychic states and a return of the repressed that allow the full articulation of what is at stake in our emotional and moral lives. Melodrama anticipates the Freudian models of psychic functioning. At the same time, Freud himself seems to work toward ever more melodramatic and mythic formulation of the basic concepts of his psychology, so that his late work can have some of the aesthetic qualities of melodrama. D. W. Griffith and Marcel Proust offer further examples of the meeting of melodrama and psychoanalysis. Freud’s pursuit of a semiotics of the body, as in hysteria, recalls the similar project of the (melodramatic) novelist, Balzac, whose novel The Fatal Skin was in fact chosen by Freud as his final reading before his death.