Freud, in his discussion of Hoffmann's The Sandman () in The Uncanny (), unlike many literary critics,1 does not dismiss the protagonist's fantasies and experiences as “products of a madman's imagination.”2 Rather, he shows that in the hero's fear of losing his eyes, we have the oedipal level of the “bad” father. Freud thus concentrates his interpretive efforts on mediating to the reader how the author transforms the protagonist's feelings, wishes, and infantile beliefs into the images and plot of a work of literature. Furthermore, he is interested in showing why the reader responds to these images