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Far from psychobiography and “textual psychoanalysis,” this article probes into the all-informing fantasy of the Primal Scene in Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher.” It seeks to demonstrate, by relying on Marin, Rancière and Rosolato, that a pre-Freudian work of art can resort to an intuition of repressed images and mechanisms at work in our symbolization of life and death, precisely to represent the impossibility of imitation, while paradoxically opening up to another form of mimesis. It thus touches upon the very question of the origin of creation and identifies a specifically literary knowledge of the unconscious, which may account for this tale’s inexhaustible power of fascination.