Literary modernism cognitivizes the gothic by engaging the counter-conversionary energies that James associated with the sick-soul’s awareness of the human potential for evil. Where psychological commentary on the First World War’s aftermath typically concerns “shell-shock,” this chapter highlights the period’s equal investment in the cognitively rehabilitative potentialities of modernist “techniques of dissociation” to disrupt dangerous excesses of affect and forestall identification with fascistic beliefs. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) and Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), demonstrate how the various information streams—song lyrics, social commentary, and newspaper publicity—haunt their protagonists, producing self-estranging varieties of dissociation characteristic of the Jamesean sick soul, wherein soul-sickness indicates both a recognition of and resistance to dehumanizing beliefs.