I take as the departure point for this special section on “Psychoanalysis and the Arts” Freud's essay on “The Uncanny” (1919) which, he admits, is a rare excursion into the realm of aesthetics or what he calls the “theory of the qualities of feeling.” He strives to explain here what others have neglected: the special core of feeling that inspires the uncanny. He very interestingly begins his essay with a comprehensive linguistic survey of the various meanings of the word unheimlich or uncanny. For some six pages, he outlines definitions and usages of this word in order to demonstrate definitively that unheimlich contains within it, its opposite. He writes, “Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich.
The uncanny is linked to what is known and unknown, familiar and unfamiliar, present and absent, alive and dead. It is a place of fear and uncertainty and, yet, also a place of intense homeliness or familiarity. These contradictions contain its power. After his lengthy linguistic preamble, Freud moves on to a remarkable series of examples to illustrate his explorations, running the gamut from linguistics to literature to popular magazines to common anecdotes to allusions to his own clinical and theoretical studies, to quite casual clinical commonplaces. All such sources are pilfered to find instances of the uncanny.
Importantly, Freud's essay starts by trying to account for a feeling, one that occurs in life as in literature and which, he insists, the aestheticians have neglected because they have preferred to study the beautiful and the sublime over the revolting or the frightful. The uncanny is that order of experience that was meant to remain hidden, but has come to light. The “uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old—established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.”
To stir up the sensations of the uncanny, art must be linked to infantile complexes such as castration anxiety, womb fantasies, or to primitive superstitions that were thought to have been surmounted by the individual but emerge by the uncanny experience. When the uncanny is experienced in actuality, its power is linked to the same sources as the power wielded by the artist, namely the power to stir up infantile and animistic worlds. The uncanny puts us in a primitive state. We feel we are at once on familiar and yet foreign territory. We are quite off balance.
The uncanny is linked to what is known and unknown, familiar and unfamiliar, present and absent, alive and dead. It is a place of fear and uncertainty and, yet, also a place of intense homeliness or familiarity. These contradictions contain its power.
The three articles we have brought together here on the contemporary artistic scene each reference works which put the reader, viewer, and audience off balance. The artistic productions they discuss accomplish the end that Freud identifies as one of the functions of analysis itself: to put the analysand off balance enough that the unconscious can be heard.
Donald Kuspit specifically invokes Freud's essay on “The Uncanny” to lambaste American surrealism, which he calls inauthentic and compromised, a denial of the very existential core of European surrealism. If the core of aesthetic feeling is the uncanny, European surrealism responded to this conviction, depicting the latent dream-scape in all reality: The uncanny and the unconscious are made perceptually manifest in their works. Such works are necessarily themselves instinctually evocative and reminiscent of the dream. This effect defines the surreal and yet, for Kuspit, is entirely missing from the works of the American surrealists, who sacrifice the unsettling world of the uncanny for a socially informed and, therefore, tepid understanding of the tradition they appear to emulate.
The effects of the uncanny in narrative are, according to Freud, experienced as real. This is why, for instance, we do not think of fairy tales or indeed the diary of the madman as uncanny. “There is no question, therefore, of any intellectual uncertainty here: we know now that we are not supposed to be looking at the products of a madman's imagination, behind which we, with the superiority of rational minds, are able to detect the sober truth….” The experience of the uncanny is aesthetically evocative precisely because it circumvents those sensations of superiority and calls our everyday reality into question.
It is this very reality that is challenged by Meg Wolitzer in her work, as she describes it in an interview with psychoanalyst Sandra Leong.
Vera J. Camden, Ph.D., is professor of English at Kent State University, a psychoanalyst on the Cleveland Psychoanalytic Center faculty, and in private practice in Cleveland. She is founding chair of the Committee on Research and Special Training Essay Prize Subcommittee and co-editor of American Imago.
Wolitzer here speaks about using her analysis as a way out of a creative “stasis” in her own creative life. She muses about her “conversation” with her analyst in writing her highly acclaimed new novel, The Position. In this work she ironically portrays “primal scene” encounters of children with their parents' sexuality. This topic of the primal scene—of which we do not “hear much these days,” according to Wolitzer—is both known and unknown in contemporary culture. The silence around specifically parental sexuality is uncanny in the context of a permissive culture so saturated with the sexualization of children and adolescents. Wolitzer's narrative art breaks that silence with wit and compassion—and puts us all off balance.
If Freud is right that aesthetic power derives from an encounter with the known and the unknown, then the power of Carol Churchill's recent Broadway play, A Number, surely derives from its confrontation with the evitable reality and unreality of human cloning. Psychoanalysts Phillip Freeman and Fred Sander describe their recent experience as interpreters of this play to an audience of analysts who gathered in New York for a post-performance discussion. In this discussion the analysts exemplified their roles as mediators and guides to new frontiers of human knowledge and experience. The human clone is, perhaps, quintessentially uncanny as a character: he (or it?) is embraced as a familiar while denied as an alien. Both recognize the realm of the theater as a place of aesthetic exploration of unconscious fantasy and desire and, as analysts, acknowledge their place as facilitators into realms unconscious and unknown. Indeed, as the sidebars to their discussion suggest, Sander and Freeman also enjoy breaking out of the coiled spring of analytic restraint to share the stage as producer and director, respectively of Pygmalion and the chilling Marat/Sade.
Each of these articles explores how aesthetic feeling is rooted in unconscious experience and how the uncanny as the core aesthetic feeling leads us along the royal road to creative discovery and expression.