TERROR, FASCINATION, UNCERTAINTY:

A READING OF FREUD’S PAPER “DAS UNHEIMLICHE”

1. Not only one, but three enigmas

In 1919 Freud published a paper dealing with what he defined an enigma (Rätsel) (Freud 1919, p.

259) and entitled it using a word (Das Unheimliche1) which reflected that definition: that word in

fact is a substantiated adjective which can designate what induces a certain feeling, or that

feeling, or both, or their qualities. These can be designed also by an adjective (unheimlich), while

a substantive (die Unheimlichkeit) designates the feeling. Freud remarks that it is difficult to

translate that word in other languages and to conceptualize the phenomenon which it designates

because its «meaning develops toward an ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite»

(p. 237/377): it can means what is not familiar but was, what is not hidden but was and what is

new but was old.

The paper not presents only the enigma of “das Unheimliche” reflected in the word. It presents

also that of its own obscurity2 which has suggested to many authors that it leaves largely

enigmatic the phenomenon itself and dismays the reader (Cixous 1972, 199; Rolli 2002, p. 39 and

109). The attempt has been made to resolve this enigma interpreting that obscurity as the mark of

a complex thought about death, or giving particular relevance to the literary criticism of the

second paragraph, or ascribing it to the impossibility to conceptualize the phenomenon

(Masschlein 2003).

It is however possible to search for the resolution of this third enigma in the introductive note

of Strachey to the English edition, namely in its mention of a letter of May 1919 in which Freud

informed Ferenczi to have retook writing the paper, which he had begun writing six years before,

while he attended to Beyond the pleasure principle. This information has been considered as a

proof of the existence of a nexus between the two works granted by their contemporaneousness

(Pagnini 1977, p. 167). However it signifies also that Freud interrupted writing the book to turn to

writing the paper. Therefore it proposes a third enigma: that one concerning the intention which

lead Freud to interrupt the first writing. In addition, it suggest the hypothesis that the solution of

this third enigma will facilitate the solutions of the two others: if we will succeed in identifying

1 “Das Unheimliche” is currently translated into English with “the uncanny” and Freud’s paper is generally known

under this name. That translation presents two weak points: it emphasize the negative aspect of the phenomenon and

does not transmit the idea of what is unfamiliar or unknown which is the core of the German word. In order to avoid the

difficulties arising from these two weakness, we prefer to maintain the German word. The meaning of the German

word could be expressed with “unhomely”, as suggested by Joan Riviere in a footnote to his translation of Freud’s

paper («Throughout this paper “uncanny” is used as the English translation of “unhemlich”, literally “unhomely”»

CP IV p. 370). However it cannot be used because is an adjective which renders the German “unheimlich”, but is

unable to render also the German substantiated adjective “das Unheimliche” and the substantive “die Unheimlichkeit”,

unless we resort to the neologisms “the unhomely” and “unhomeliness”.

2 The paper has been judjed «fuyant, labirinthique, hésitante» (Cixous 1972, 199) and filled with forced interpretations

of literary works (Scharpè 2003), entangled paths of research, «empty spaces» (Rolli 2002, p. 24 e 52), «disorderly

heap of lexicography, applied clinical psychoanalysis and literary criticism» (Borghart & Madelein 2003), ecc..

that intention and read the paper in close relation with the book, we could also dispel its obscurity

and orient ourselves about the phenomenon with which it deals.

2. The first enigma: why Freud retook writing Das Unheimliche while he was writing

Beyond the pleasure principle?

a. The intention denied

Our interest in the above mentioned intention is sharpened by Freud’s reticence about it: he

concludes the paper declaring to have written it «ohne rechte Absicht», without a defined

intention (Freud 1919, p. 267). However, a nexus exists between the two work for the fact that

both deals with the themes of repetition and death. This nexus does not allows us to believe that

Freud interrupted writing the book without any intention, because the overlap of two works on the

same themes would have signified an unaccountable waste of time.

In order to identify that intention we must remember that Beyond the pleasure principle is

divided in two parts: a clinical one constituted by the first three paragraphs, and a «speculative»

one (Freud 1920, p. 23) constituted by the following four. In the first paragraph of the first part,

Freud defines the trauma as the breaking of the state of balance in a psychic system functioning

on the basis of the pleasure principle and as a crisis of that system (p. 5); in the second, he lists

various forms of that breaking (pp. 9-11) and remarks the tendency of the subjects which have

experienced a crisis to repeat it in play, or in transfert, or in a life destiny; in the third he

dismisses the possibility to explain that tendency on the basis of the pleasure principle and

suggests the hypothesis that it shows a repetition compulsion acting beyond that principle and

independently by it (pp. 21-22) - an hypothesis that he will demonstrate in the second part

deducing the law of that compulsion from what he has said in the first part.

We know that Freud wrote Beyond the pleasure principle between March 1919 and June 1920;

that in May 1919 he stopped working on it to turn himself to the paper; and that only the first half

of the book was completed at the beginning of 1920 (Jones III, p. 57). This means that he retook

writing the paper when he had already written the first part of the book, but not yet completed the

second; and suggests that the research of the intention which lead him to turn away from writing

the book must point to identify some condition which had to be accomplished in order to write

the «speculative» part of the book itself.

b. A «particular conceptual terminology »: from “Traume” to “das Unhemliche”

We can proceed in this research if we take account of the development to which the presentation

of the theme of the trauma undergoes in the paper. Freud adopts now a «particular conceptual

terminology (eines besonderen Begriffwortes)» (Freud 1919, p. 230): he signify what induces a

crisis with the word “das Unhemliche” instead of “Traume”.

To explain this development we must notice that the beginning of the paper is linkable to a

passage of the first part of the book. Freud concludes the enumeration of the forms of the crisis in

the second paragraph of the book mentioning that constituted by the «artistic representations and

imitations». He asserts also that it differs from the others: it can provoke a «very high enjoyment

(hoher Genuß)» whereas the other forms provoke pain (Freud 1920, p. 15). Furthermore he

declares to not be interested in it since it does not confirm the existence of the repetition

compulsion which he wanted to demonstrate speculatively.

However, the fact that he begin the paper making reference to this passage of the book indicates

that he has upset that declaration and has consolidated his interest in that form of the crisis. This

upsetting and this consolidation impelled him to adopt a word more apt than “Traume” to signify

that form. “Traume” belong to a medical terminology and derivates from a Greek word which

signifies both the violent action of some agent and the consequent lesion; therefore it could not

signify also a non violent action provoking a «very high enjoyment». This could instead be

signified by “das Unhemliche” which Freud was ready to use also for others reasons. First of all

because he considered literature and art in general as the places of the massive emergence of “das

Unhemliche” (Lavaggetto 2001, pp. 56-58 e 271); but also because that word reflected the feeling

provoked to him by some works of art which he had meet during his travels to Greece and to Italy

(Magherini 1989, pp. 130-153) and signified the synthesis of that feeling with the condition of

being out of his country when he experienced it.

c. A crucial difficulty and a compelling intention

We have until now clarified that Freud substituted the word “Traume” with “das Unhemliche”

because he had upset his declaration, contained in the second paragraph of the book, of not being

interested in the crisis provoked by the works of art; we must now search for the motivations of

that upsetting in order to identify the intention which lead him to turn away from writing the

book.

The first words of the paper also say of a constriction that sometimes the psychoanalyst («der

Psychoanalytiker[…] muss») feels to investigate artistic phenomena (Freud 1919, p. 229). Also if

Freud speaks of artistic phenomena in general, we can understand that he is here declaring that he

feels himself compelled to investigate the specific experience of the crisis provoked by the works

of art. He therefore disproves the affirmation, made in concluding the paper, of having written it

without any intention; and so the problem rises of why he felt that intention as compelling.

The solution of this problem must be found in what we have said until now: the fact that art

could provoke a «very high enjoyment » constituted a difficulty to the possibility to consider the

crisis that it provoked as a violation of the pleasure principle ad as a manifestation of tendencies

put beyond it. Therefore, the intention to suspend writing the book to turn to the paper not only

existed, but was also compelling in reason of the necessity to solve that difficulty and concluding

the book with the formulation of the law of the repetition compulsion.

3. The enigma of the content of the essay

a. A first «focusing» of the difficulty

We have now solved the enigma of Freud’s intention in interrupting his writing of the book.

Therefore, we can turn to evaluate the hypothesis according to which, if we read the paper as the

attempt to achieve the book, we could solve the other enigma: that one constituted by the

obscurity of the paper itself.

In turning to this evaluation, we met immediately with a manifestation of that obscurity, namely

with one of those interruptions in the thread of the argument which some authors have interpreted

as inconsistencies. In the beginning of the paper, Freud has upset the declaration which he had

made in the book to do not be interested in the above mentioned form of the crisis; has felt as

compelling the task to face the difficulty opposed by it to his research of the repetition

compulsion; and has decided to face it. We would therefore have expected that he carried out that

decision immediately; and we are surprised by the fact that he puts aside the discourse on that

crisis to retake the one on the crisis which, as he writes, are matter not of aesthetic but of

psychoanalysis (ibid.).

However, at a closer look the interruption reveals to be consistent with the structure of the

paper. This is structured in order to face the above mentioned difficulty in the least three pages.

What precedes them has the function of «focusing (Ferstellung)» (p. 261, see also footnote 6) that

difficulty: in what precedes them Freud makes the effort to solve other difficulties with the intent

to define that one. The interruption is a first step in this «focusing ».

Something else had suggested to Freud to use the word “das Unhemliche” instead of “Traume”:

that term was particularly adequate to signify the crisis provoked by art, but could also signify the

inductive factor of all the forms of crisis. In enumerating its meanings, Freud itself remarks that it

contains a reference to the new which is absent in the other word: the “Unheimliche”, being the

“unhomely”, must be from the point of view of what is homely only something new; and, being

an unknown, must be something new also from the point of view of what is known.

This reference of that word to new furnishes a «core common to all the forms of the crisis» (p.

229) and renders that word more functional than “Traume” to signify not only the interest

expressed by Freud at the beginning of the paper in the form due to art, but also all of them. For

this same reason, however, its employment confronts the formulation of the law of repetition with

the difficulty constituted by the idea that the crisis are provoked by something new. This

difficulty was greater than the one opposed by the crisis due to the works of art to the

demonstration, in the second part of the book, of the speculative hypothesis of a repetition

compulsion: it not aroused from one form of crisis, but from all including those which had

suggested that hypothesis in the first part of the book.

Freud faces this greater difficulty criticizing an article of Jentsch who asserted that the

experience of the unhomely arouses always from something new and builds his criticizing this

assertion on two presuppositions: a premise to its presentation and its mutilation.

The premise is at its turn build on neglecting what had rendered necessary substituting the word

trauma with unhomely in order to take account also of the crisis which induced a «very high

enjoyment»: that substitution had been rendered necessary by the observation of the fact that the

unhomely do not always implied negative feelings, but now Freud suddenly and assertively

affirms that there is «no doubt (keine Zweifel)» that it «belong to the sphere of terrifying, of what

induces anxiety and repulsion (zum Schreckaften, Angst- und Grauenerregenden gehört)» (ibid).

The mutilation of Jentsch’s thesis is revealed by the confrontation of that thesis with how it is

reported by Freud. Attending to some authors, Freud’s report has the same characteristic that he

ascribes to that thesis: that report is «tasting, but not exhaustive» (p. 230). This is true, because

Jentsch did not simply suggest, as it would seem according that report, that the experience of the

unhomely is always induced by something new. He also said that the new is the appearing of the

animate (Jentsch 1909, pp. 404-409) and described that experience as «lacking of orientation»,

«intellectual hesitation» (pp. 231 e 399), «uncertainty» (p. 407). He attributed therefore to it the

characteristic of indeterminateness. Furthermore, he hinted that from it various experience could

develop ranging from terror to «the pleasurable and joyful feeling of marvel» (p. 403) and that it

was «a meaningful factor for the birth of the scientific impulse and of the spirit of research » (p.

401).

The above mentioned premise and mutilation allow Freud an easy confutation of Jentsch’s thesis.

He remarks that the new does not always provoke a terror, anxiety and repulsion and adds that, if

so, the new that provokes this feelings must contain something else than new (Freud 1919, p.

231).

He draws this something else from the exploration of the «meaning that the word “unhomely”

has acquired in the course of the evolution of language» (p. 230). This exploration shows that the

German word has an anthinomic meaning: it means both “familiar” and “unfamiliar”, “known”

and “unknown”, “ancient” and “new”. Freud puts in evidence this anthinomic meaning only at the

end of the first paragraph (pp. 235-237), but he uses it already before (pp. 230-231) in order to

anticipate the exposition of a thesis which is the opposite of Jentsch’s. Since the new do not

always provokes terror, anxiety and repulsion, this feelings must be provoked by something else

contained in it which must be the meaning of the word “unhomely” anthinomic to “new”: it must

be something familiar, known, ancient. Therefore the “unhomely” is that kind of terrifying which

belong to what we know from long time and which we have long time believed («das

Unheimliche» is «jene Art des Schrekhaften, welche auf das Altbekannte, Längstvertraute

zurückgehet») (p. 231).

Freud demonstrates this thesis in the second paragraph (pp. 237-259). He bases this

demonstration upon an exegesis of two novels by Hoffmann3, which he concludes reaffirming

what he had maintained in opposition to Jentsch: the unhomely, identified with a condition of

terror, anxiety and repulsion, is not provoked by something new, but by something that seems

new in which something ancient is hidden and return. This ancient correspond to moments of the

past collective and individual history which can be reduced to «animism, magism and fascination,

omnipotence of thougths, relation with death, involuntary repetition and castration complex» (p.

256). The feeling of “unhomely” is provoked by this past; therefore the crisis described in the

first part of Beyond the pleasure principle do not oppose to the speculation about the compulsion

to repeat suggested by them the difficulty, greater of that one opposed by the works of art, that

they would have opposed to it if the idea that they were provoked by something new would have

been confirmed.

However, this conclusion could not completely satisfy the intention of the paper. It permitted to

overcome the difficulty opposed to the speculation on the compulsion to repeat by that idea, but

not that one opposed to it by the crisis provoked by the works of art.

Freud kept in mind this difficulty also while questioned the other form of unhomely: the

psychoanalytic inquiry on them, he observes, went on using examples desumed almost all from

the kingdom of fiction and poetry «fast alle […]… dem Bereich der Fiktion, der Dichtung,

entgenommen» (p. 261); but, having now concluded a first inning of the «focusing» of that

difficulty and having resolved another one, begin its second inning which will end with the full

formulation of the first difficulty.

He start this second inning in the third paragraph (pp. 259-268) which he begin expressing

doubts about the conclusion he has reached concerning the crisis which differ from that induced

by art. In a first moment, he observes that that conclusion crash against the inverse of the

objection with which he had faced the thesis of Jentsch: not only the new, but neither the ancient

to whom he had reduced the new is by itself terrifying (p. 259)4. In a second moment, he

reinforces this objection with two arguments: he quotes from fairly tales and literary works

examples of the return of the removed which do not provoke the experience of the unhomely in

the sense of terrifying and mentions two conditions of that experience which differ from the

3 This is the most known and expounded part of the paper. Many authors have shown that Freud’s exegesis of

Hoffmann’s novels does not reflect their meaning, but aims at disproving Jentsch’s idea of a link between

Unheimlicheit and uncertainty, and between new and unheimlich: «Freud seems to state here that he only wants to go

beyond Jentsch's insights, but quite soon it becomes clear that he does not validate the notion of intellectual

uncertainty as a constitutive factor for the uncanny. Hence, during the entire essay, he will try as much as he can to

minimize this intellectual uncertainty» (Sharpè 2003). 4 «Nicht alles, was an verdrängte Wunschregungen und überwundene Denkweisen del individuellen Vorzeit und der

Völkerurzeit mahnt, ist darum auch unheimlich».

return of the removed: danger and uncertainty («intellektuelle Unsicherheit»). He will discuss the

first condition at the end of the paper in a fleeting and enigmatic way. We can therefore pass over

it and turn our attention to the second, underlining that its mention implies the return of what

Freud had removed in his presentation of Jentsch’ thesis: namely the fact that Jentsch conceived

the “unhomely” as due to uncertainty and as characterized by vagueness.

The return of this removed cracks the identification of the “unhomely” with the terrifying which

Freud had premised to his taking the new back to the ancient and has two joined effects. If the

possibility for the unhomely to be provoked by new depends on its being linked to the feeling of

terror, the fact that it can be linked also to other feelings reopens that possibility, enacting again

the difficulty which impeached the conclusion of the book and flinging open a door to the doubt

about it (p. 261);5 furthermore, since that conclusion has been reached through a psychoanalytic

enquiry, an «aesthetic enquiry» seems necessary to overcome the doubt now opened on it (ibid.).

Freud can therefore declare that he has concluded the first «focusing» of the difficulty which

impeached him to complete the second part of the book and to formulate the law of repetition

compulsion (ibid.); in fact, he meets now again that difficulty and is obliged to proceed to a

second «focusing»6 intended first of all to clarify it, getting himself into the field of an «aesthetic

enquiry», «peripheral» to a psychoanalytic one.

b. A second and definitive «focusing» of the difficulty

Freud seems now to loose again the thread of his reasoning since, instead of proceeding to clarify

the difficulty, he turn himself to trace a distinction between the “unheimlich” experienced and the

imagined one. In defining the first unheimlich he does not take account of the crack of the

identification of the unheimlich with the terrifying; in other terms, he does not yet deal with the

problem of what it is independently from that identification, but deals again with the problem of

why the return of the past does not always provokes the unheimlich identified with the terrifying.

To solve this problem he confirm that the experienced unheimlich must be always reduced to the

return of something past, but now he distinguishes this past in past complexes and in past beliefs:

the first ones can only be removed and therefore anytime they become present anew they provoke

the feeling of the unheimlich identified with terror; the second ones can have been surpassed

through an examination of reality and therefore anytime they become present anew do not

provoke that feeling (p. 263).

Having so solved the doubt raised against his conclusion by the experimented unheimlich, Freud

immediately confronts himself with that one raised by the imaged unheimlich pertaining to the

5 «(…) würden wir dem Zweifel der Tor öffnen, welchen Wert unsere Einseicht in die Herkunft des Unheimlichen vom

verdrängten Heimischen eigentlich beanspruchen darf». 6 At the beginning of the third paragraph Freud writes making reference to its content: «(…) Man könnte zwar sagen ,

mit jener ersten Verstellung ist das psychoanalytische Interesse am Problem des Unheimlichen erledig». (Freud 1919,

p. 261). Freud’s declaration that until this point of the paper he has developed «a first focusing» entitle us to search for

a second one which is that which he began to develop now.

«world of literary fiction». Only now he began to expose the difficulty that has motivated him to

write the paper; and we understand that we met now its central point when he affirms that the

imaged unheimlich, which is the source of that difficulty, deserves «gesonderte Beobachtung» (p.

264), particular and extraordinary consideration.7

In dealing with this difficulty, Freud affirms that the doubt raised by the imaged unheimlich

cannot be solved in the same way in which has been solved the experimented one. It cannot be

contrasted by the test of realty because literary fiction does not care of reality in two ways: it

neglects reality completely (as the tales and in part in visionary works), or introduces fiction in it.

The difficulty created in the first way does not deserve «particular and extraordinary

consideration». The fact that a same phenomena provokes terror experienced, but do not provokes

it when encountered in fiction is easily explained by the fact that in this second instance it is meet

out of real experience. The real difficulty is therefore constituted by the works that introduce

fiction in reality.

Freud remarks that these works «make also use of all the conditions which in the real

experience produce the feeling of the unhemlich, and therefore everything that has an unhemlich

effect in life, has it also in poetry» (p. 265). However this remark is immediately followed by

adversative particle, «but (aber)», which shows the difficulty that Freud intends to face. This

difficulty arise from the fact that these works can produce everything that has an unheimlich

effect in life, but can also «increase and multiply it (steigern und vervielfältigen)». They broken

with their «fiction» the static thread of habitual experience, and therefore they can increase the

feeling of unheimlich identified with terror; but they can also provoke another kind of that

feeling. Freud uses now for the first time the plural: he speaks of «new possibilities of unhemlich

feeling (neue Möglichkeiten unheimlichen Gefhüls)» and specifies what is the unhemlich which

adds itself to that one which provokes terror: it is that one induced by the works which «wink to

marvellous (mit dem Wunderbaren liebäugelnden)» (p. 266).

Freud has now definitely focused the difficulty which prevented the formulation of the law of

the repetition compulsion: it consists in the fact that certain works of art provoke an

Unhemlichkeit which do not has the quality of terror and therefore cannot be interpreted as due to

the return of a past; on the contrary, it has the quality of “marvel” and can be interpreted as due to

the appearing of something new.

c. Omissions in the attempt to overcome the difficulty

Having focused the difficulty, Freud tries now to overcome it in the two following pages which

are the nervous core of the paper. It is not easy to understand them because what they say is based

on something else that they do not say. However, Freud himself gives us the key to understand

them when he mentions the Schnitzler’s novel Die Viessagung as an example of the works which

7 «Gesonderte», particular, extraordinary.

«wink to marvellous»: if we face the novel with way in which Freud reports it, we could identify

what he does not say in order to give to the word “marvellous”8 a meaning which restrict the

meaning of art and makes it accessible to a «rationalistic or maybe analytic attitude ».

In the novel, an historian narrates the story of a young officer to whom a magician had

predicted the time and the place of his death. The prediction is write down accompanied by the

drawing of the place and of the scene of its fulfilment and the date of this documents is certified

by a notary. The officer confides his anxiety for the prediction to the historian and shows him the

document with the drawing. When the prediction was fulfilled, the historian shows them to a third

person for verifying the extraordinariness of the case; but both notice that the sheet is now

«white, without any written word, without any drawing …» (Schnitzler 1905, p. 150).

Freud make us of the novel to maintain that the works of art which ««wink to marvellous» and

provoke unhemlich deceive the reader because they make him believe that their tale takes place at

a certain level which they withdraw suddenly and unexpectedly when is «too late» and he has no

more the possibility to defend himself. Therefore Freud’s expression «too late » make reference

to the expression «white sheet» which appear suddenly and unexpectedly at the end of the novel.

However this expression reflect the characteristic of Schnitzler’s poetic, its aiming at breaking off

the customary flowing of experience through the sudden opening of windows of analogous

expressions which traumatize the reader because very often they appear lately and always

unforeseen and flashing. He too was a physician. He complained to have wasted his time studying

medicine, but the Uneimlichkeit he wanted enact with those expressions was the remedy which he

offered to a society vacillating under the weight of its very old certitudes. Those expressions were

the traumatic event which subtracted any meaning and averted the reader from the word he know

inducing uncertainty in him.

The expression «white sheet» aims therefore at proposing an unexpected newness and at

exciting uncertainty. Its meaning is abysmally distant from that attributed to them by Freud: the

uncertainty that they aim at exciting is very different from the “marvellous” at which, according

to him, they would wick. The novel presents many figures of experiencing and knowing: the

magician, the victim of the prediction, the historian who collects and reports the events, the artist

who gives them a meaning, the spectator with his feelings, and, in the background, a physician

who is a friend of the artist and represents the identity and the function that this one attributes to

himself. Each figure is distinguished from the others. In particular, the magician is distinguished

from the artist-physician, the Unheimlichkeit induced by his illusionisms and predictions is

distinguished from that induced by the artist, the feeling linked to the first is distinguished from

that linked to the second. The true or presumed prodigies showed by the magician to the others

8 «Wunderbar» contains an ambiguity which must be considered in order to follow the effective development of the

paper. The substantive “Wunder” if neuter means “marvel”, if feminine means “prodigy”, “wonder”, “miracle”. The

adjective, which is here substantiated, collects these meanings: it can mean “marvellous”, “prodigious”, “wonderful”,

“miraculous”. It can refer to the beauty of art which infuses uncertainty or to the paranormal which infuses “marvel”

in the sense of an ambivalent feeling where terror and fascination alternate. Freud gives to the word this last meaning.

figures of the novel are totally different from the «unexpected newness » (De Marchi 2006, p. 8)

of the «white sheet» showed by the artist to the reader: this one belongs to the uncertainty which

provokes at research, the other to the marvellous paranormal which evokes the ambivalent feeling

of terror and enchantment. On the contrary, the «hurry to reach the unconscious» (ibid.) which

Schnitzler reproached to Freud pushed this one to assert that the content of the art was the

“marvellous” evoking ambivalence and that the artist was the same than the magician.

Freud gives us an hint about the origin of this abysmal distance of the meaning of Schnitzler’s

expression from that attributed to it by him. He admits to have reacted to the words of the novel

which arrive «too late» with «ein Art von Groll» (Freud 1919, p. 266). «Groll» means

resentment and repulsion and is a term near to the term «grauen» which he had used at the

beginning of the paper in declaring that the unheimlich «belongs to the sphere of terrifying, of

what engenders anxiety-repulsion». However in the unheimlich engendered by Schnitzler’s

expression there is no trace of terrifying, there is the restitution of an uncertainty engendered by

an unexpected newness. Therefore what Freud acknowledges with the words quoted above is his

own repulsion toward the uncertainty contained in the unheimlich engendered by the novel. We

must therefore think that what deprived the «white sheet» of its meaning of proposition of

uncertainty and substituted it with the opposite meaning of proposition of the ambivalent feeling

engendered by paranormal was the pulsional factor of this repulsion which was structured in a

perceptive disposition developed during the travels to Greece and Italy.

We can better recognize this hidden movement if we began to suggest that a crucial passage in

the history of western civilization represents itself in this neuralgic and elusive joint of the paper.

The perceptive disposition which obliged Freud to attribute to uncertainty the meaning of the

marvellous paranormal did not appeared in his personal history starting from the repulsion which

provoked him «estrangment (Entfremdung)» (Freud 1936) in Athens and «perplexity

(Ratlosigkeit)» in san Pietro in Vincoli in Roma (Freud 1914a). It was already structured in

consequence of the powerful works of paranormalisation of the supersensible on which Kant had

based his answer to the uncertainties of Charlotte von Knobloch almost a century before: the

shadow of Swedenborg returned in the figure of the magician as interpreted by Freud and in that

one of the artist whom he identified with him; and the world of the Schwärmerei - made of

clairvoyance, prophecy, communication with the deaths, «dreams of reason» (Kant 1766) -

returned in the “marvellous” as interpreted by him.

That paranormalisation was assimilated by Freud trough education. It acts now in founding his

solution of the difficulty opposed to the law of repetition compulsion by the works of art which

do not wick to marvellous, but challenge to give a form to the wished and possible; by those ones

which do not give rise to the obsessive doubt, but show the path of research.

Freud has now paranormalised the supersensibile and given to uncertainty the meaning of the

marvellous identified with the paranormal. He can therefore proceed in the effort to solve the

anomaly opposed to the law of repetition compulsion not by the uncertainty itself, but by an

uncertainty to which he had given this meaning. In this effort, he make use of tree tools: action,

judgment, and explanation. He cites his own reaction of repulse to an uncertainty to which he has

given the over mentioned meaning as example of wealthy action in face of uncertainty; condemns

the lacking of that reaction as a kind of passivity and the induction of that uncertainty as

«falsehood», «device» and «malice» due to an intention of plagiarism by the side of the artist

identified with the magician; and explain the lacking of that reaction to the induction of the

ambivalent feeling of marvel, this feeling and the possibility of plagiarism, as the return of the

animistic superstition in modern time (Freud 1919, pp. 265-266).

We are now near to the conclusion of the paper. Tree periods remain (pp. 266-268), the first of

which contains that negation of any intention in writing it which we already know and on which

we will return. However we must now make a pause in order to notice that we have verified our

initial hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, the identification of Freud’s intention in writing

the paper, and the reading of the paper itself in the light of that intention, would have allowed us

to solve its enigmatic obscurity. It is effectively so: the complexities, the empties and the doubts

which many authors have seen in it, and which are the causes of its obscurity, reveal now to be

elements of a discourse which is tormented and constructed with difficulty, but also consistent,

rightly oriented and articulated in the four moments of the proposition of a difficulty, of its

focusing, of its illustration and of the attempt to overcome it.

4. The enigma of the unheimlich

a. Freud’s narration of the history of the trauma

In his letter to Ferenczi quoted by Strachey, in which he communicates to have begun again to

write the paper of 1919 interrupting Beyond the pleasure principle, Freud communicates also that

he begun to write the paper six years earlier, while he was writing Totem and taboo.

The two texts are linked not only by chronology. Their whole establishes an analogy through

four phenomena: the taboo, the holy, the categorical imperative (Freud 1913, p. 3 e 32) and the

unheimlich. Freud begin Totem and taboo showing the analogy existing through the first tree

phenomena. He then extends this analogy to the unheimlich 9: also the “taboo” is an «enigma» (p.

31) since it draws an antinomic meaning from the opposite qualities of the feelings that it

provokes which are identical to those provoked (according to the paper of 1919) by the

unheimlich contained in the works of art which «wick to the marvellous»: «heilige Scheu» (p.

27), horror and veneration, terror and attraction, repulsion and fascination.

The link is still more tight. In Totem and taboo Freud does not only point out the analogy

among the taboo, the sacred and the categorical imperative; he also presents them as tree moment

in the history of ambivalence and adds to them in 1919 as fourth moment of that history the

9 The word “unheimlich” is already present in Totem and taboo (Freud 1913 pp. 26, 31, 32) as adjective not yet

substantiated which simply means “terrifying”

unheimlich because of its analogy with them. He therefore confers to it a place in that history

which define its meaning. Those four phenomena represent four enigmas corresponding to the

forms of ambivalence which follow one another in that history and therefore trace a course of

humanity proceeding from animism to religion, to philosophic rationalism, to the era of science

when what remains of the first of those forms, that is of the taboo, presents itself again in the art

under the form of the unheimlich. Freud confers to this course the progressive meaning of an

increasing reduction of ambivalence and assigns to what he considers the most advanced

realisation of the era of science, that is to psychoanalysis, the task to resolve that residual

emancipating the civilisation from the «disease» (Freud 1930) which wasted it and threatened the

«decline of the West» (Spengler 1919). The four enigma are structurally analogous and can mark

four different moments of the history of civilisation because they stay in a relation of continuity

and distinction established by the fact that each of them is an interpretation of the preceding one

which determinates a progress in the reduction of ambivalence.

We must remark that, according to Totem and taboo, the beginning of that history coincides

with a preanimistic period which precedes an animistic one in which the ambivalence is clearly

defined in the form of the taboo (Freud 1913, pp. 93 e 112-113). Freud thinks, as Hobbes did, that

the beginning of the human world proceeds from a first and elementary form of trauma: that one

induced in human beings by their conflict and by the hostility of nature (p. 97). This form does

not engender immediately violence, but terror; and, according to what Freud writes in Totem and

taboo, there is not violence either in the mentality which expresses «the practical interest» to

solve that trauma and to overcome terror. This mentality would express that interest in a first

form of magic founded in the belief that nature itself is animate and that it is possible to act on it

through a thought which is considered omnipotent because sustained by the same narcissism

which allows the child to solve the fragmentariness of the autoerotic phase: only now the

ambivalence would arise, in analogy with the fact that it arise in the child only when he leaves the

narcissistic phase and establishes the relation with the object (pp. 108-111).

The analogy that Freud has established between the evolution of civilisation and the

development of the child become problematic at this point. His explanation of the passage of the

primitive man to animism differs from his explanation of the passage of the child to the relation

with the object because, according to him, the objects of the relation are not the same in the two

cases. In fact he affirms that the passage of the child from the narcissistic omnipotence to the

relation with the object is consequent to a trauma induced by an undefined reality principle; but

he explains the passage of the primitive man from preanimism to animism as consequent to the

moment of a history of the trauma subsequent that one constituted by the conflict and by the

hostility of nature, that is to the moment in which the conscience of death become the prevalent

traumatic factor (p. 95). The relational objects of the child appearing consequently to this

passage are the parental figures, those of the primitive man the spirits, that is the objectification of

a magic power previously felt as immanent in nature. The ambivalence appears in the child when

the relation with those figure is established, but appears in the primitive man when is established

the relation with the spirits. The primitive man explains the new traumatic factor constituted by a

first consciousness of death which is not yet seen as a natural event as due to a magic powers of

the spirits. He believes that the spirits who have the power to give death have also the power to do

not give it: therefore according to him they, together with everything participating of their power,

are taboo, that is objects of an ambivalent relation made of terror and veneration, of the impulse

to run away from them and to appropriate of their strength in order to acquire control on death

and on themselves.

The way in which Freud explains the origin of ambivalence in Totem and taboo shows that he

conceives it as an historical construction. He thinks that even its first form, that one pertaining to

the animistic period, is consequent to a development in the history of trauma which causes an

interpretation of the interpretation given by man in the preanimistic period to the form of terror

induced by the form of the trauma prevalent in it. The sacred would be at its turn the

interpretation given in the era of reason to the animistic interpretation; it simplifies the objects of

ambivalence because reduces the spirits to the gods and successively to one god facilitating the

control on those objects. The categorical imperative is at its turn the consequence of the

interpretation given in the era of philosophic rationalism to the religious interpretation; it

simplifies the ambivalence and facilitate its control even more because recognizes that the

ambivalence does not springs from something external to the subject but from the subject itself,

and because anticipate the concept of the Super ego. The quantity of the ambivalence not

contained by that rationalism is filtered through its meshes by art which become therefore the

prevalent traumatic factor; that quantity, which flows in this way into modernity, is solved by

psychoanalysis which collects it in the form of the unheimlich, recognizes it as a rest of the

ambivalence of taboo and interprets it as the return of the defined trauma constituted by the

killing of the primordial father.

b. An apparent omission in Freud’s narration of the history of trauma

It is not therefore casual that Freud began writing the essay on the unheimlich while he was

writing Totem and taboo: the two works mark two moments of the texture of a narration which

describes the history of civilisation as a progressive reduction of the ambivalence and

subordinated its passages to a history of the trauma.

An aspect of this narration can surprise: a passage seems lacking in it. The narration points out

the initial moment in the trauma’s history which causes the passage from preanimistic magic to

the taboo and from this to the sacred; it points also out the moment, succeeding the passage from

the sacred to the categorical imperative, constituted by the return of the magic through art whose

resolution is the historical task of psychoanalysis; but it seems say nothing about the moment of

that history which causes the crisis of the interpretation of ambivalence given by the culture of the

sacred and opens the way to its containment in the categorical imperative.

This omission is most surprising because Freud could have avoided it if he would have paid

attention to a detail of Schnitzler’s novel. The magician of the novel has an unlikely name, Marco

Polo: introduced without any explanation that name is another «white sheet». The character of the

magician in the novel hints at Swedenborg, but his name hints at something else. It hints at the

far-off beginning of the western history’s period generally named “Renaissance” in which the

history of the trauma underwent a development which crashed the certainties of the civilisation of

the sacred organized around the trauma of death and around the terror induced by it. In that period

became prevalent the form of trauma constituted by the narration which Marco Polo made of his

journey as a symbol of the narrations of other journeys: those of subsequent explorers and

cartographers in lands previously unknown, of painters in the deepness of perspective, of

Copernico in the world of heavenly bodies, of Humanists in the rests of a past which the

civilisation of the sacred had condemned to oblivion.

These narrations provoked a trauma engendering a condition of uncertainty which did not

become necessarily and immediately terror, since it implied a disposition to research. However

the research did not went only into the external space of nature and of past time opened by those

narrations. It went also into the internal space constituted by uncertainty itself, but it could go into

this space because with that uncertainty appeared also an idea unknown to the culture of the

sacred: the idea of the new as indefinite prefiguration of the future realization of the potentiality

inherent in that space.

Then narrations appeared, weaved with images and with words, which related the journeys

through this internal space oriented by the compass of that idea and directed toward that

realization. The sculptures of Michelangelo, not yet completely free from the weight of the

marble, narrated of a culture not yet defined in respect to nature, of an humanity tended to the

realization of its own potentialities. The «non finito» of Leonardo’s paintings, the smile of their

women, their background made of vague landscapes crossed by inconclusive paths, narrated the

possibility to reach forms of human which were in intuition and potentially, but had never been

experienced («mai in isperienza» quoted by Freud 1910, p. 276); Machiavelli narrated his journey

across «vie non trite» toward a human form represented by the metaphor of «princes without

fathers» which meant a form had to be find beyond the certainty of the ancestors and of the

agnation, in the pure potentiality of an uncertain birth (Armando 2004; 2008a; 2008b).

The above mentioned metaphor suggests to clarify what has been sketched just before: when of

the trauma of uncertainty appeared, also the idea of the new appeared. This idea is implied in the

concept of Renaissance and its intimate contradiction has defied both who lived in that period and

who tried to define that concept in the end of the nineteenth century. We must agree with what

Freud had asserted against Jentsch, that the new sends always back to a past: the concept of new

can take form only picking it from the past, and the will to think it as absolute leads to

schizophrenic mannerism or simple schizophrenia, if not to the belief in spirits or in god.

Therefore both who lived in the Renaissance and who tried to understand it at the end of the

nineteenth century were obliged to trace back the new to some past well before that Freud had

traced it back to the past of the Oedipus complex. They did so choosing among what they

disposed of: classical antiquity, Christian origins, their conciliatio. Machiavelli’s metaphor

(which as we will see is echoed in the condition to which Freud traces back the art of Leonardo)

implies the resolution of this contradiction because it identifies the past, to which the new must be

traced back in order to be thought, with the concept of a human birth reflected in the beginning of

the human world, which in its turn implies the idea of the new as pure potentiality.

This idea of the new was then sketched by the tree narrations briefly mentioned above. That

idea meant the development of the history of the trauma which amplified and increased the

internal space disclosed by the other narrations and caused that crisis of the culture of the sacred

which evolved in the formulation of the categorical imperative and whose omission in the

narration weaved by Freud in Totem and taboo and in the essay of the 1919 surprised us.

However there was no reason to be surprised. In fact, we realize that he gave particular

attention to that development when we understand that he does not weaves the narration of the

history of civilization only in the whole of Totem and taboo and in the paper on the unheimlich,

but also in a greater whole including two papers, devoted to the two over mentioned artists, which

he wrote while he was writing that book and when he begun to write that paper: the papers on

Michelangelo in 1914 and on Leonardo in 1910, which must therefore be read as parts of the

wholeness of that narration.

Freud had meet the trauma of uncertainty which the Renaissance had imposed to the following

centuries in his first journey to Italia, namely in Florence and in Saint Peter in Vincoli in Rome;

and the two above mentioned papers fully outline this experience.

Thanks to Rank and Sachs he overcame his reluctance to publish the essay on Michelangelo.

This reluctance remembers us his devaluation of the conclusions of the paper of 1919 and was

motivated by his awareness of how forced it was his attempt to confine the meaning of the image

of Michelangelo’s Moses in the minimum detail of a finger’s posture. Nevertheless the essay is

important, if not for what it says about that image, for what it says on the reaction of the author to

it. That image results «enigmatic» (Freud 1914a, p. 175) to him; he is touched by it without

knowing «why and from what » (p. 172); he is thrown by it in what he call «intellectual

perplexity (intellektuelle Ratlösigkhei)» (p. 173). In other words that image is a trauma for him

because what it contains and propose «cannot be said in words» (ibid.), escapes the immediate

translation in a verbal symbol. To this trauma he oppose his own «rationalistic or perhaps analytic

attitude» (ibid.) which expresses itself in the research of a content of the work which is certain,

definite, verbally expressible and coherent with that attitude; a content that he find in the

meaning of a rage revealed by that posture.

Freud’s reaction to the form of the trauma which appeared in Renaissance is yet better

illuminated by the other essay. He considers also Leonardo as «enigmatic» (Freud 1910, p. 213)

and recognizes that the proposition of the «non finito» and the smile of his women constitute the

two main characteristics of his paintings. However he denies that the «non finito» expresses the

artist’s intuition «of a perfection which he every time despairs to be able to represent» (p. 216)

and reduce its meaning to that of the incomplete and the unfinished as symptoms of an

«inhibition» consequent to the excessive cares of his mother. Also the smile of Leonardo’s

women is enigmatic (p. 253) to Freud and disconcerts him. He makes therefore appeal to his

«rationalistic or perhaps analytic attitude» to go over interpreting it as an enigmatic manifestation

of a latent homosexuality shown by the other minimum detail (this time an invented one) of the

image of a kite.

Nor in the essay on Leonardo, neither in his other works, Freud makes any reference to

Machiavelli. However something in that essay resound as a reference to his narration of his own

journey through the «vie non trite» of the internal space of uncertainty. In fact, Freud founds his

interpretation of Leonardo’s art on a particular aspect of his life. He connects the excessive cares

of his mother, and therefore his impotence and homosexuality, with his illegitimate birth, with his

being a bastard (p. 227) - a condition which pertains also to the human form of the «princes

without fathers». A human form conceived to mean an identity whose basis were not in the

certainty of human or heavenly ancestors, but on the pure potentiality of an uncertain birth, and to

represent the new in the past of that potentiality. The works discussed here are contemporary to

the book on the trauma of birth (Rank 1909) in which Rank formulated an analogous idea of

identity. The condemnation of it pronounced by Freud in 1926 confirms what is already evident

in his essay on Leonardo: he does not recognizes in the illegitimate birth the meaning of a pure

potentiality, but that one of the condition of the development of a pathology to which he could

reduce the uncertainty and explain, on the basis of his «rationalistic attitude», why it touched him.

We have then read Das Unhemliche as a dowel of a whole to which participate also the other

works which we have examined. This approach permits us to conclude that Freud’s attempt to

solve the trauma of uncertainty by reducing it to ambivalence and by reducing the ambivalence to

the Oedipus complex, is founded on a narration according to which that complex is the actual

presence of the ontogenetic trauma of the murder of the primeval father. We can also conclude

that this narration attempts to reduce the trauma of uncertainty appeared in Renaissance to that

complex in order to eradicate the uncertainty itself.

c. A real omission in Freud’s narration of the history of trauma

However that narration is conditioned by a passage in the history traced by it which it does not

name: Freud make reference, also if in the way we have shown, to the trauma which determinates

the passage from the sacred to the categorical imperative, but he presents that passage as an

immediate one and omits its complex gestation.

The trauma of uncertainty appeared in Renaissance marks a crucial moment in the history of

Western civilisation which resounds in actuality. The remains of the culture of the sacred react to

it still today interpreting it as the beginning of a “modernity” which they contempt because it has

opened the Pandora’s box of what is wished but impossible and as the starting point of a process

of decadence in relativism and nihilism.10

However this yet actual reaction is itself consequent to

an history to which we must give a look also if risking approximation.

It is not casual if that history begins with the instructions of the Council of Trent to the artists.

Their intention was to exorcize the images of the art of Leonardo and Michelangelo (Forcellino

2008 pp. 165-173) suppressing their exploration in the internal space and imposing the

Mannerism and its «immagini disciplinate» whose dull figurativity was broken only tree centuries

afterwards (with few exceptions, in particular Caravaggio), when the Impressionism took place in

Freud’s Paris. Those instructions were then addressed also to the narrations which employed

words constricting them to conceive the internal space of uncertainty as an external one inhabited

by the same spirits of the animistic period now became saints and devils; they also promoted the

expulsion of this space so conceived from the field of research and committed its government to

the institutions of the culture of the sacred. That expulsion, represented in Galileo’s abjuration,

was strengthened by the Cartesian limitation of the research at the res extensa and by Leibnitz’s

theory of the «double government» and reached full expression with Kant’s criticism (Butts 1984;

Armando 1992; 2000). This one confirmed the identification of the internal space of uncertainty

with the word of spirits. However Kant thought that the belief in their existence was due to a

«minority of man» which would be solved by the overcoming of his «incapacity to use the

intellect» (Kant 1784); he thought also that this overcoming would have permitted to understand

what appeared in that space, and had been identified in that way, as a «dream of the reason», as a

«chimera» generated by a natural and pathological disposition to fantasize which he called

Schwärmerei (Kant 1766). The internal space of uncertainty was declared to be unknowable and

the functioning of reason was submitted to the categorical imperative to avoid any reference and

even to extirpate its notion through a therapy of the mind and a pedagogic practice in order to

prevent any reference to it.

The attempt to solve the trauma of uncertainty induced by art reducing it to the trauma of the

ambivalence made by Freud not only in the essay of 1919 but in the whole of his works here

examined is grafted in the over sketched history and depends substantially by it. Freud’s

10 This contemporary reaction is particularly evident in the thinking of the American Neocons (Strauss 1989;

Fukuyama 1992) and of J. Ratzinger (Ratzinger-Pera 2004; Ratzinger 2007). On this point see Drury 2005 e Armando

2005.

reduction of the artist’s character to that of the magician, of the trauma induced by the works of

art to something which induces both terror and fascination, resumes the concept of the

Schwärmerei employed by Kant to solve the perturbations he had felt in his youth for having read

of Rousseau’s opposition to the domain of reason. However Freud does not relate himself to that

concept in the same way in which Kant did, but in a way which strengths that domain. Si flectere

nequeo supera, Acheronta movebo: Kant formulated the categorical imperative to keep the

Schwärmerei out from the legitimate interest of reason and, having recognized the impossibility

to obey to that imperative, opposed to the Schwärmerei the ideal of the «end of everything» (Kant

1794), the valorization of ageing and death. Freud shared this ideal in concluding the speculative

part of Beyond the pleasure principle; but he had previously tried to penetrate in the

Schwärmerei, with whom he too had identified uncertainty, rising in it the flag of reason and

imposing to it the «rationalistic attitude» that he had inherited.

At this point we have acquired the possibility to solve also the first enigma of the paper of 1919,

namely that one constituted nor by Freud’s intention in writing it neither by its obscurity, but by

the phenomenon with which it deals. Having read it as a part of a larger discourse, as a chapter of

a work whose other chapters are the tree mentioned papers, and having recognized that it engrafts

itself in a tradition of thinking, we can conclude that does not exists any «enigma of the

unheimlich». It is not true that the unheimlich can’t be conceptualised (Masschelein 2003). We

can conceptualise it, at the condition to distinguish the phenomenon itself from the phenomenon

as it is presented and interpreted by Freud; namely, at the condition to distinguish the

phenomenon as it appears to us through the Erlebnis that Freud had of it from how it appears in

his reflection on it.

The unheimlich in itself is an event which produces a change in the representation that a subject

has of the external space and induces in him an uncertainty about his own collocation in that

space. But it is this event only in so far as it produces in its turn another event: that constituted by

a change in that subject’s representation of his own internal space which renders him uncertain

about his own identity and defies him defining it anew. However this first approximation to the

concept of the unhemlich in itself must be determined making reference to what we have learned

through the two omissions, the apparent and the real one, which we have remarked in the

narration of the history of civilisation constructed by Freud in the whole of the works which we

have commented. The event which has induced in a subject uncertainty about his collocation in

the external space has obviously always induced in him in its turn some quantity of uncertainty

about his identity; however it is most important to consider two aspects in what happened in the

specific historic moment of the passage from the Fifteen to the Sixtieth century. At that time that

quantity was remarkably increased; consequently the uncertainty about identity became clearly

distinguished from that about the collocation in the external space and became the unhemlich

event which provoked the crisis of the culture of the sacred and gave beginning to modernity. In

synthesis, then, the unhemlich in itself can be conceptualised as the event constituted by the

irruption in the subject - in a certain moment of the history of Western civilisation and

continuously reproduced in it by a certain art - of an uncertainty which dissolved an identity

based on the ancestors, hinting to the wished and possible of an human image not yet edited.

Freud’s concept of unheimlich is very far from this one. It presupposes a tacit but determining

interpretative moment: that one constituted by the identification of uncertainty with the

ambivalent feeling of terror and fascination and of the disposition to research primed by

uncertainty with the obsessive doubt primed by that feeling. That concept is then followed by a

second interpretative moment: that feeling is explained declaring its «whence ad why» in terms

which render it compatible with the «rationalistic and perhaps analytic attitude » which sees in it

the remain of a belief in spirits springing from an original crime and renewed by art.

This second interpretative moment surely is conditioned by the first, which can be said

“unconscious” in so far it corresponds to the not critical assumption of an historical construction

through the exposition to a pedagogical practice springing from that construction. However the

discussion of the problem implied by this affirmation would push us too far beyond the limits of a

comment to the paper of 1919. We must instead get near its conclusion. In order to do this, we

first of all confirm, contradicting what Freud asserts in that paper, no «enigma of the unheimlich»

exists; what exists is an uncertainty which is not enigmatic but problematic and a long lasting

process of removing it rendering it enigmatic. To this process Freud takes part in a specific way

which consists also in creating in 1919 the construct of the unheimlich. However it would be a

non sense to reproach him the not critical dependence from a tradition of repulsion of uncertainty

or condemn it for having taken part to the process of its removing. We must rather inquire shortly

into the historical meaning of that having taken part.

5. The uncertainty of a conclusion

The sentence with which Freud declares his «rationalistic and perhaps analytic attitude» sounds

oddly to us: that «perhaps» communicates both a certainty and an uncertainty.

The paper of 1919 must be read in a context which includes another work in addition to those

already commented. On the history of the psychoanalytic movement extends the declaration and

the demonstration of a belief that Freud had already expressed in Totem and taboo: the

categorical imperative marks a progress in the history of the liberation of man from the plague of

ambivalence and of the obsessive doubt, but psychoanalysis marks another and definitive

progress in it. Psychoanalysis reduces that imperative to the psychic formation of the Super Ego

(Freud 1932, p. 67 e 176) and provides the tools, if not to resolve, to render bearable the

«disease» consequent to the excesses of that formation; it represents the eschatological moment

of the history of humanity in which the «rationalistic attitude» does not just attend to do not be

contaminated by the Schwärmerei, but intends also to interpret and resolve the ambivalence and

the obsessive doubt primed in it.

However it was not sure that psychoanalysis could realize this intent. It suffered of a weakness:

it had been built without facing neither the «repulse» by which it was motivated nor the

uncertainty which provoked that repulse; psychoanalysis had instead given to uncertainty a new

name, “ambivalence”, and pretended to understand it having accepted the attribution to it of the

improper meaning of the Schwärmerei now called “marvellous”. Uncertainty returned, but was

rendered invisible by this disguise. Therefore it assumed an aspect of despairing elusiveness

which could be opposed only by a speculation apt to resolve everything in the conviction of an

unavoidable «return to the inorganic», of the «end of everything ».

However that «perhaps» does not mean only the impossibility to present psychoanalysis as the

eschatological moment of the history of humanity for the fact that it had been built on the

«repulse» of uncertainty; it means also Freud’s emotional, if not intellectual, honesty to be able to

live again a fleeting moment of uncertainty.

This meaning of that «perhaps» is confirmed by the conclusion of the paper of 1919. The way

in which Freud worked out the difficulty opposed by certain works of art to his concluding

Beyond the pleasure principle was not convincing for him either, since it is followed by the

statement to have written the essay «without a right intention». As we know, this statement

involves the negation of the intention which constrained him to break his writing the book, but it

implies also the admission of not having carried out that intention. In fact Freud reduces

immediately after the intention to «temptation (Versuchung)», that is to something extemporary

and limited to the explanation of some example which contradicted his idea that the unheimlich

was caused by the return of something past, distressing and repulsing (Freud 1919, p. 267).

Furthermore that negation, both in itself and in this meaning, signifies that the conclusion of the

paper does not infuse the same unheimlich with which the essay deals in the reader only. It

infused it also in Freud: a curse which starts from a constraining intention and reach the simple

obedience to a temptation is analogous to that of who starts from a place and finds himself in

another having lost sight of the place from which started, and therefore feels lost and uncertain.

Therefore Freud concludes the paper asserting something about the unheimlich conceived as the

trauma induced by an art which does not re-proposes to the present animism but the trauma of the

passage from Fifteenth to Sixtieth century. However we do not find what he asserts at that regard

in the content of the paper, but in the feeling of unhemlich that it induced in Freud and induces in

the reader. This feeling shows that the unheimlich has not the characteristic which Freud tried to

assign to it, because both Freud’s feeling and the feeling of the reader which reflects it is not the

compound of terror and ambivalence with which he had identified it in order to complete the

book. It contains something else: not only the experience of doubt hinted by the word

“temptation”; but also something hinted by the adjective which qualifies the denied intention.

«Ohne rechte Absicht»: «rechte», means “exact”, “straight”, “sure” and “certain”. Therefore the

Unheimlikheit induced in Freud by the fact that he did not realized the intention which obliged

him to write about the unheimlich shows the affective quality of uncertainty; that is that quality

that according to him it had not since he, in criticizing Jentsch thesis, had first identified it with

terror, anxiety and repulsion and then with the compound of terror and fascination. The feeling of

unheimlich present in Freud’s personal experience reflects the crisis of the long lasting attempt to

eradicate uncertainty.

The declaration of that crisis in the conclusion of the paper of 1919 is Freud’s historical

contribute to the resumption of the research on uncertainty and to a new discovery of its value.

This resumption is conditioned by a deep and renewed reflection on the phenomenon of trauma

which is the core of Freud’s thinking; it is also the task of present history and must be object of

another work.

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