The Double Vision of "Das Unheimliche"

Wasn't he looking, through the haunted pane, for something he couldn't see?—and wasn't it the first time in the whole business that he had known such a lapse?

—Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

I

We begin with a confession: "it is only rarely that a psychoanalyst feels impelled [Antrieb] to investigate the subject of aesthetics" (Freud 1919, 219). Occupied with his work in "other planes of mental life," the psychoanalyst has "little to do with those subdued emotional activities which . . . usually furnish the material for a study of aesthetics" (219). This is an extraordinary claim; one that seems rather out of sync with the profusion of poetic references that adorn Freud's texts. Of course, the author here admits that "it does occasionally happen that he has to interest himself in some particular province of that subject," but when this happens "it usually proves to be a rather remote region of it" for reason of it having been otherwise neglected in aesthetic writings (219). The psychoanalyst, therefore, in writing on aesthetics is not in his home country but far afield in some remote region of some distant province. The psychoanalyst is doubly estranged: he is neither in his usual psychoanalytic haunts nor even, insofar as he resides in the foreign province of aesthetics, in the familiar landscape of beautiful things, but in a remote and fearful corner. Impelled there by whatever strange force drives him, it is an altogether appropriate subject with which the psychoanalyst concerns himself here: das unheimliche, the uncanny.

Himself not-at-home, we can perhaps understand why in his introductory remarks the author of the text speaks from the indefinite position before, in the body of the text, abandoning this indefinite form of address in favor of the first person. After telling us that "a psychoanalyst feels impelled" on those rare occasions in which "he has to interest himself," the author begs our forbearance, confessing that "the writer of the present contribution, indeed, must himself plead guilty to a special obtuseness in the matter, where extreme delicacy of perception would be more in place" (1919, 220). This is again a rather extraordinary claim, not least since it seems that the work of the psychoanalyst would indeed be precisely that work which engages an "extreme delicacy of perception." But no matter. What is at stake here is a certain debt for which the author feels compelled to answer. And how does he answer? First of all, we are told that the one who is impelled is "a psychoanalyst"—not psychoanalysis in general or psychoanalytic theory, but a psychoanalyst. That is, the debt belongs to a person, which, of course, is the psychoanalyst—Freud himself who, feeling impelled, is writing. But the compulsion of this debt is not Freud's own finite or infinite debt, but an indefinite debt: the debt of "a psychoanalyst" who has to "interest himself in some particular province" which "usually proves to be rather remote." It is a kind of debt in the abstract, an indefinite compulsion that begins the work. And what does the author do with this debt? He pleads guilty; he asks for forbearance. In the payment of this debt which is, as he claims, not really his own, "he [meaning Freud himself] must start by translating himself into that state of feeling, and awakening in himself the possibility of experiencing it" (220; emphasis added). If Freud here is the one who writes, the one whose debt inaugurates the compulsion, he does so in a foreign language.

We've actually skipped over a paragraph in which Freud writes about himself. He's justifying the claim that a psychoanalyst only concerns himself with certain remote regions of the province of aesthetics, and avows that "I know of only one attempt in medico-psychological literature" to give an account of the uncanny, done by one E. Jentsch. It is a "fertile" attempt, but not "exhaustive." Yet, Freud continues, "I must confess that I have not made a very thorough examination of the bibliography," and thus "my paper is presented to the...