The Eyes of the Other Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the Uncanny

Freud’s The Uncanny (1919) is one of the most important meeting points between literature and psychoanalysis. From the beginning, the uncanny is for Freud an aesthetic and literary question more than a psychoanalytic one: “It is only rarely that a psycho-analyst feels impelled to investigate the subject of aesthetics . . . he works in other strata of mental life” he writes. This improper subject, one which marks a “crisis of the proper”, brings psychoanalysis together with its literary “other,” in Shoshana Felman’s sense that “literature in psychoanalysis functions precisely as its ‘unthought’: as the condition of possibility and the self-subversive blind spot of psychoanalytical thought”. Felman’s point is not just that psychoanalysis has from the start been involved with literature, but that literature is inside psychoanalysis in ways that psychoanalysis cannot fully grasp. Psychoanalysis can certainly turn its attention to literature, as Freud does with E.T.A. Hoffmann in The Uncanny, but more fundamentally, literary forms of thinking, which are inherently metaphorical, multiple and ambiguous, shape the way psychoanalysis reads its subjects, their dreams, anxieties and desires. Yet despite this, literature remains in some way resistant to psychoanalysis, never wholly reducible to its terms.