To begin understanding how the modernist novel explored new conceptions of the self, we may briefly consider two works published in 1895: Fontane's Effi Briest and the Studien über Hysterie by Freud and Breuer. In Fontane's novel, accurate knowledge about the characters is in principle readily accessible, both to the narrator and to the characters themselves. Not only does the narrator give us authoritative accounts of Effi's personality and motives (chapters 3 and 20), but the major characters, whether in conversation or private reflection, are articulate and self-analytical to an extraordinary degree. They lack that layer of unconscious mental activity which finds expression in all the purposive mistakes that Freud called 'Fehlleistungen' or parapraxes. Despite her wildness and spontaneity, Effi seems preternaturally self-controlled by comparison with the disturbed young women in the Freud–Breuer case histories: Anna O., for example, who at one time was unable to drink any water because she had seen a dog drinking out of a water-glass, and at another time lost her command of German and communicated solely in English. In Fontane’s presentation of character, the articulate, controlled social self dominates the private self that is rooted in the body with its unruly, non-verbal drives. But by the end of the century, the fictional conventions of the social novel were wearing thin; they were readily compatible with irony, as in Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks (1901), or with downright comedy, as in Heinrich Mann’s Im Schlaraffenland (1900; In the Land of Milk and Honey). A fictional exploration of the self, running parallel with the new psychologies, needed a different range of narrative devices and expressive techniques.