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The article draws together various major literary and philosophical works from the nineteenth and twentieth century up to the sixties, a period that gave up on old references to the exalted ego of introspective novels, the sense of the historical world of great ideological epics, as well as the absolute ideal of art, religion and metaphysics. In some cases, this renunciation led to a lack of differentiation between literature and human sciences. However, the parallel enthusiasm for non-reductionist existential autobiography or for criminal investigation as an allegory of metaphysical reflection in terms of ego, as well as the flood of cosmic or theological science-fiction novels, seem to express – as is the author’s hypothesis – the hidden displacement of a repressed desire, that of three absolutes – Ego, World, God – rather than the irreversible loss of this desire.