16/10/2024
Sigmund Freud: ‘The Uncanny’ - Lecture 6
● Published in 1919 - after WW1 - pervasive influence on psychiatry, medicine,
literature and the arts.
● Significant in terms of sense of self and how people understand themselves. Focus
on introspective.
● Concepts of individuality and society.
● Freud can be seen as a literary interpreter - in the way we might decipher and dissect
what an individual is, in terms of their own inner psyche.
● ‘The Uncanny’ - sense of self and how you understand yourself. About human
relationships, sexuality and repression, reality and the imaginary: rooted in our minds
which disturbs and dislocates, which we cannot control.
● Clash between mind and intellect. Individuals' external character contrasted to their
internal psyche.
Jean Rhys’ ‘Good Morning, Midnight:
● Focuses upon self-identity, fear and fairy tales.
● Sense of not fitting in within the novel - not reconcile inner self what they’re expected
to be in their outer self.
● Idea of fear at the very root of Freud's perspective.
● Women, men, animals are a threat to the individual who is psychologically burdened.
● Self-identity: ‘I would never be part of anything. I would never really belong
anywhere, and I always knew it, and all my life would be the same, trying to belong,
and failing. Always something would go wrong. I am a stranger and I always will be,
and after all I didn’t really care’ - Jean Rhys, ‘Smile Please: An Unfinished’.
Autobiography’. Freudian perspective - a person here is deeply uncomfortable with
their inner self.
● 'You want to know what I'm afraid of? All right, I'll tell you. I'm afraid of men - yes, I'm
very much afraid of men. And I'm even more afraid of women. And I'm very much
afraid of the whole bloody human race. Afraid of them? Of course I'm afraid of them.
Who wouldn't be afraid of a pack of damned hyenas?'. The idea of fear being at the
root of Freud’s perspective of how a human functions. Fear is a focal point that we’re
trying to move away from, but always brought back to.
● Fairy Tales and ‘The Sandman’: Sasha reflecting on the job she had writing 'fairy
stories for a very rich woman':"They explain people like that by saying that their
minds are in water-tight compartments, but it never seemed so to me. It's all washing
about, like the bilge in a hold of a ship. Psycho-analysis might help. Adler is more
wholesome than Freud, don't you think?’ Fairy tales trigger the authority of the
imagination.
Christopher Isherwood, ‘Goodbye to Berlin’.
● Published in 1939 - very moment based in Berlin in another social crisis like the First
World War - global trauma.
● ‘Berlin’ - dynamic, vibrant, culturally familiar.
● Goodbye to normality and hello to anxiety.
Sigmund Freud: ‘The Uncanny’ - Lecture 6
● Published in 1919 - after WW1 - pervasive influence on psychiatry, medicine,
literature and the arts.
● Significant in terms of sense of self and how people understand themselves. Focus
on introspective.
● Concepts of individuality and society.
● Freud can be seen as a literary interpreter - in the way we might decipher and dissect
what an individual is, in terms of their own inner psyche.
● ‘The Uncanny’ - sense of self and how you understand yourself. About human
relationships, sexuality and repression, reality and the imaginary: rooted in our minds
which disturbs and dislocates, which we cannot control.
● Clash between mind and intellect. Individuals' external character contrasted to their
internal psyche.
Jean Rhys’ ‘Good Morning, Midnight:
● Focuses upon self-identity, fear and fairy tales.
● Sense of not fitting in within the novel - not reconcile inner self what they’re expected
to be in their outer self.
● Idea of fear at the very root of Freud's perspective.
● Women, men, animals are a threat to the individual who is psychologically burdened.
● Self-identity: ‘I would never be part of anything. I would never really belong
anywhere, and I always knew it, and all my life would be the same, trying to belong,
and failing. Always something would go wrong. I am a stranger and I always will be,
and after all I didn’t really care’ - Jean Rhys, ‘Smile Please: An Unfinished’.
Autobiography’. Freudian perspective - a person here is deeply uncomfortable with
their inner self.
● 'You want to know what I'm afraid of? All right, I'll tell you. I'm afraid of men - yes, I'm
very much afraid of men. And I'm even more afraid of women. And I'm very much
afraid of the whole bloody human race. Afraid of them? Of course I'm afraid of them.
Who wouldn't be afraid of a pack of damned hyenas?'. The idea of fear being at the
root of Freud’s perspective of how a human functions. Fear is a focal point that we’re
trying to move away from, but always brought back to.
● Fairy Tales and ‘The Sandman’: Sasha reflecting on the job she had writing 'fairy
stories for a very rich woman':"They explain people like that by saying that their
minds are in water-tight compartments, but it never seemed so to me. It's all washing
about, like the bilge in a hold of a ship. Psycho-analysis might help. Adler is more
wholesome than Freud, don't you think?’ Fairy tales trigger the authority of the
imagination.
Christopher Isherwood, ‘Goodbye to Berlin’.
● Published in 1939 - very moment based in Berlin in another social crisis like the First
World War - global trauma.
● ‘Berlin’ - dynamic, vibrant, culturally familiar.
● Goodbye to normality and hello to anxiety.
