Freud - Complete Works (612 page)

The 'Uncanny'

3683

   This short summary leaves no
doubt, I think, that the feeling of something uncanny is directly
attached to the figure of the Sand-Man, that is, to the idea of
being robbed of one’s eyes, and that Jentsch’s point of
an intellectual uncertainty has nothing to do with the effect.
Uncertainty whether an object is living or inanimate, which
admittedly applied to the doll Olympia, is quite irrelevant in
connection with this other, more striking instance of uncanniness.
It is true that the writer creates a kind of uncertainty in us in
the beginning by not letting us know, no doubt purposely, whether
he is taking us into the real world or into a purely fantastic one
of his own creation. He has, of course, a right to do either; and
if he chooses to stage his action in a world peopled with spirits,
demons and ghosts, as Shakespeare does in
Hamlet
, in
Macbeth
and, in a different sense, in
A
Midsummer-Night’s Dream
, we must bow to his decision and
treat his setting as though it were real for as long as we put
ourselves into his hands. But this uncertainty disappears in the
course of Hoffmann’s story, and we perceive that he intends
to make us, too, look through the demon optician’s spectacles
or spy-glass - perhaps, indeed, that the author in his very own
person once peered through such an instrument. For the conclusion
of the story makes it quite clear that Coppola the optician really
is
the lawyer Coppelius ¹ and also, therefore, the
Sand-Man.

   There is no question therefore,
of any intellectual uncertainty here: we know now that we are not
supposed to be looking on at the products of a madman’s
imagination, behind which we, with the superiority of rational
minds, are able to detect the sober truth; and yet this knowledge
does not lessen the impression of uncanniness in the least degree.
The theory of intellectual uncertainty is thus incapable of
explaining that impression.

  
¹
Frau Dr. Rank has pointed out the
association of the name with ‘
coppella
’ =
crucible, connecting it with the chemical operations that caused
the father’s death; and also with ‘
coppo
’
= eye-socket.

The 'Uncanny'

3684

   We know from psycho-analytic
experience, however, that the fear of damaging or losing
one’s eyes is a terrible one in children. Many adults retain
their apprehensiveness in this respect, and no physical injury is
so much dreaded by them as an injury to the eye. We are accustomed
to say, too, that we will treasure a thing as the apple of our eye.
A study of dreams, phantasies and myths has taught us that anxiety
about one’s eyes, the fear of going blind, is often enough a
substitute for the dread of being castrated. The self-blinding of
the mythical criminal, Oedipus, was simply a mitigated form of the
punishment of castration - the only punishment that was adequate
for hum by the
lex talionis
. We may try on rationalistic
grounds to deny that fears about the eye are derived from the fear
of castration, and may argue that it is very natural that so
precious an organ as the eye should be guarded by a proportionate
dread. Indeed, we might go further and say that the fear of
castration itself contains no other significance and no deeper
secret than a justifiable dread of this rational kind. But this
view does not account adequately for the substitutive relation
between the eye and the male organ which is seen to exist in dreams
and myths and phantasies; nor can it dispel the impression that the
threat of being castrated in especial excites a peculiarly violent
and obscure emotion, and that this emotion is what first gives the
idea of losing other organs its intense colouring. All further
doubts are removed when we learn the details of their
‘castration complex’ from the analysis of neurotic
patients, and realize its immense importance in their mental
life

   Moreover, I would not recommend
any opponent of the psycho-analytic view to select this particular
story of the Sand-Man with which to support his argument that
anxiety about the eyes has nothing to do with the castration
complex. For why does Hoffmann bring the anxiety about eyes into
such intimate connection with the father’s death? And why
does the Sand-Man always appear as a disturber of love? He
separates the unfortunate Nathaniel from his betrothed and from her
brother, his best friend; he destroys the second object of his
love, Olympia, the lovely doll; and he drives him into suicide at
the moment when he has won back his Clara and is about to be
happily united to her. Elements in the story like these, and many
others, seem arbitrary and meaningless so long as we deny all
connection between fears about the eye and castration; but they
become intelligible as soon as we replace the Sand-Man by the
dreaded father at whose hands castration is expected.¹

  
¹
In fact, Hoffman’s imaginative
treatment of his material has not made such wild confusion of its
elements that we cannot reconstruct their original arrangement. In
the story of Nathaniel’s childhood, the figures of his father
and Coppelius represent the two opposites into which the
father-imago is split by his ambivalence; whereas the one threatens
to blind him - that is, to castrate him -, the other, the
‘good’ father, intercedes for his sight. The part of
the complex which is most strongly repressed, the death-wish
against the ‘bad’ father, finds expression in the death
of the ‘good’ father, and Coppelius is made answerable
for it. This pair of fathers is represented later, in his student
days, by Professor Spalanzani and Coppola the optician. The
Professor is in himself a member of the father-series, and Coppola
is recognized as identical with Coppelius the lawyer. Just as they
used before to work together over the secret brazier, so now they
have jointly created the doll Olympia; the Professor is even called
the father of Olympia. This double occurrence of activity in common
betrays them as divisions of the father-imago: both the mechanician
and the optician were the father of Nathaniel (and of Olympia as
well). In the frightening scene in childhood, Coppelius, after
sparing Nathaniel’s eyes, had screwed off his arms and legs
as an experiment; that is, he had worked on him as a mechanician
would on a doll. This singular feature, which seems quite outside
the picture of the Sand-Man, introduces a new castration
equivalent; but it also points to the inner identity of Coppelius
with his later counterpart, Spalanzani the mechanician, and
prepares us for the interpretation of Olympia. This automatic doll
can be nothing else than a materialization of Nathaniel’s
feminine attitude towards his father in his infancy. Her fathers,
Spalanzani and Coppola, are, after all, nothing but new editions,
reincarnations of Nathaniel’s pair of fathers.
Spalanzani’s otherwise incomprehensible statement that the
optician has stolen Nathaniel’s eyes (see above), so as to
set them in the doll, now become significant as supplying evidence
of the identity of Olympia and Nathaniel. OIympia is, as it were, a
dissociated complex of Nathaniel’s which confronts him as a
person, and Nathaniel’s enslavement to this complex is
expressed in his senseless obsessive love for Olympia. We may with
justice call love of this kind narcissistic, and we can understand
why someone who has fallen victim to it should relinquish the real,
external object of his love. The psychological truth of the
situation in which the young man, fixated upon his father by his
castration complex, becomes incapable of loving a woman, is amply
proved by numerous analyses of patients whose story, though less
fantastic, is hardly less tragic than that of the student
Nathaniel.

  
Hoffmann was the child of an unhappy marriage. When he was three
years old, his father left his small family, and was never united
to them again. According to Grisebach, in his biographical
introduction to Hoffmann’s works, the writer’s relation
to his father was always a most sensitive subject with
him.

The 'Uncanny'

3685

   We shall venture, therefore, to
refer the uncanny effect of the Sand-Man to the anxiety belonging
to the castration complex of childhood. But having reached the idea
that we can make an infantile factor such as this responsible for
feelings of uncanniness, we are encouraged to see whether we can
apply it to other instances of the uncanny. We find in the story of
the Sand-Man the other theme on which Jentsch lays stress, of a
doll which appears to be alive. Jentsch believes that a
particularly favourable condition for awakening uncanny feelings is
created when there is intellectual uncertainty whether an object is
alive or not, and when an inanimate object becomes too much like an
animate one. Now, dolls are of course rather closely connected with
childhood life. We remember that in their early games children do
not distinguish at all sharply between living and inanimate
objects, and that they are especially fond of treating their dolls
like live people. In fact, I have occasionally heard a woman
patient declare that even at the age of eight she had still been
convinced that her dolls would be certain to come to life of she
were to look at them in a particular, extremely concentrated, way.
So that here, too, it is not difficult to discover a factor from
childhood. But, curiously enough, while the Sand-Man story deals
with the arousing of an early childhood fear, the idea of a
‘living doll’ excites no fear at all; children have no
fear of their dolls coming to life, they may even desire it. The
source of uncanny feelings would not, therefore, be an infantile
fear in this case, but rather an infantile wish or even merely an
infantile belief. There seems to be a contradiction here; but
perhaps it is only a complication, which may be helpful to us later
on.

The 'Uncanny'

3686

   Hoffmann is the unrivalled master
of the uncanny in literature. His novel,
Die Elixire des
Teufels
, contains a whole mass of themes to which one is
tempted to ascribe the uncanny effect of the narrative; but it is
too obscure and intricate a story for us to venture upon a summary
of it. Towards the end of the book the reader is told the facts,
hitherto concealed from him, from which the action springs; with
the result, not that he is at last enlightened, but that he falls
into a state of complete bewilderment. The author has piled up too
much material of the same kind. In consequence one’s grasp of
the story as a whole suffers, though not the impression it makes.
We must content ourselves with selecting those themes of
uncanniness which are most prominent, and with seeing whether they
too can fairly be traced back to infantile sources. These themes
are all concerned with the phenomenon of the ‘double’,
which appears in every shape and in every degree of development.
Thus we have characters who are to be considered identical because
they look alike. This relation is accentuated by mental processes
leaping from one of these characters to another - by what we should
call telepathy -, so that the one possesses knowledge, feelings and
experience in common with the other. Or it is marked by the fact
that the subject identifies himself with someone else, so that he
is in doubt as to which his self is, or substitutes the extraneous
self for his own. In other words, there is a doubling, dividing and
interchanging of the self. And finally there is the constant
recurrence of the same thing - the repetition of the same features
or character-traits or vicissitudes, of the same crimes, or even
the same names through several consecutive generations.

The 'Uncanny'

3687

   The theme of the
‘double’ has been very thoroughly treated by Otto Rank
(1914). He has gone into the connections which the
‘double’ has with reflections in mirrors, with shadows,
with guardian spirits, with the belief in the soul and with the
fear of death; but he also lets in a flood of light on the
surprising evolution of the idea. For the ‘double’ was
originally an insurance against the destruction of the ego, an
‘energetic denial of the power of death’, as Rank says;
and probably the ‘immortal’ soul was the first
‘double’ of the body. This invention of doubling as a
preservation against extinction has its counterpart in the language
of dreams, which is fond of representing castration by a doubling
or multiplication of a genital symbol. The same desire led the
Ancient Egyptians to develop the art of making images of the dead
in lasting materials. Such ideas, however, have sprung from the
soil of unbounded self-love, from the primary narcissism which
dominates the mind of the child and of primitive man. But when this
stage has been surmounted, the ‘double’ reverses its
aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes
the uncanny harbinger of death.

   The idea of the
‘double’ does not necessarily disappear with the
passing of primary narcissism, for it can receive fresh meaning
from the later stages of the ego’s development. A special
agency is slowly formed there, which is able to stand over against
the rest of the ego, which has the function of observing and
criticizing the self and of exercising a censorship within the
mind, and which we become aware of as our ‘conscience’.
In the pathological case of delusions of being watched, this mental
agency becomes isolated, dissociated from the ego, and discernible
to the physician’s eye. The fact that an agency of this kind
exists, which is able to treat the rest of the ego like an object -
the fact, that is, that man is capable of self-observation -
renders it possible to invest the old idea of a
‘double’ with a new meaning and to ascribe a number of
things to it - above all, those things which seem to self-criticism
to belong to the old surmounted narcissism of earliest
times.¹