24,656
edits
Changes
no edit summary
In "[[The Uncanny]]" [[Freud]] seeks to explain the feeling of uncanniness.
[[Freud]] attibutes the feeling to a repressed infantile complex that has been revived.
Hoffman's "The Sandman" describes the figure of the Sandman who steals the eyes of children.
The sense of uncanniness arises from that which is both fearful and frightening.
[[Freud]]'s short essay on the [[uncanny]] is an important landmark in the [[history]] of [[psychoanalytic criticism]], not least in that it moves away from the analysis of [[author]]s and introduces a thematic reading of works of [[literature]] that provoke a sense of dread, unease or [[horror]] in the reader.
In this essay [[Freud]] explores Hollmann's stories ''The Sandman'' and ''The Devil's Elixir'', concentrating on those themes that can be related to the [[fear]] of [[castration]]: severed limbs, the children's eye that are magically removed by the sandman to feed his own children.
He interprets them as an expression of the male conviction that there is something [[uncanny]] or threatening about the female genitals.
According to [[Freud]], the feeling of dread arises because the [[uncanny]] (''unheimlich'') is also familiar or homely (''heimlich'').
Hoffmaann's stories evoke something that was once familiar, but which has been made unfamiliar and [[uncanny]] by [[repression]].
The ''unheimlich'' is the entrance - the maternal genitals - to the original human home or ''Heimat''.
[[Freud]]'s argument is underpinned by the philological theory that certain primal words have antithetical meanings and by the observation that [[dream]]s often use a single [[image]] to express contraries.
[[Freud]] claims that the seeming antonyms ''heimlich'' and ''unheimlich'' are in fact synonyms adn that they prove that primitive elements still survive in the [[unconscious]].
The encounter with the [[uncanny]] thus relates to the rediscovery of something that is very ancient in both individual and historical terms.
[[Freud]] develops this concept with references to etymology and linguistic variants, and observations or fantasies that appear in novels.
The term ''umheimlich''
The French, English, and Spanish translations of unheimlich all fail to recapitulate the principal reference to the familiar, or family (heim, or home), which defines and limits the notion of the uncanny.
''Das Unheimliche'' is defined as "that particular variety of terror that relates to what has been known for a long time, has been familiar for a long time."
We are presented at once with a paradox that Freud does nothing to alleviate since the familiar should not be disquieting.
This proposition is at the heart of Freud's ideas about the original pleasure-ego that coincides with the good and rejects the bad. In "Instincts and their Vicissitudes" (1915c), we find the same opposition between ego/non-ego, just as we do in "Negation" (1925h).
Still, it is not clear why the familiar should be threatening and therefore, a second element is needed, namely, the secret, the hidden, which gives rise to the notion of hostility and danger.
For danger is associated with penetrating what is sealed off, and strangeness—based on an idea Freud borrowed from von Schilling—with the revelation of what should by rights remain hidden because it is the bearer of transgression.
To these linguistic and fantasy associations, Freud, in the second part of the essay, introduces a number of literary examples (many from Hoffmann), centered primarily on the intellectual uncertainty over whether something is living or not (from Jentsch).
There it is shown how the repetition compulsion manifests itself through the return of the repressed.
This is true even in situations where we expect the new and with it the return of the dead to life.
Freud helps establish his thesis on the basis of the study of works of literature.
==See Also==
* [[Double]]
* [[Fear]]
==References==<references/>* Freud, Sigmund. (1919h). Das Unheimliche. Imago, 5: 297-324; GW, 12: 229-268; The "uncanny," SE, 17: 217-256.* UNCANNY )(386) CD
[[Category:Terms]]
[[Category:Help]]
[[Category:New]]
[[Category:Sigmund Freud]]
[[Category:Freudian psychology]]
[[Category:Psychoanalysis]]
[[Category:Concepts]]
