Sigmund

The French feminist author saw him as hesitant, but I think he is pretty straightforward. He just likes to use a lot of fancy sentences to lead you there. His style is mostly high. However, I will agree that he is a “capricious stage setter.” He talks in third person in the beginning, then takes authority in using I and directly judging jigdinh Jentsch as “quite right.” He seems to bring things out of nowhere at times, especially when he’s driving home his ideas. He then takes the authority to say there only two ways to look at uncanny. And he does, as she wrote, “justify himself to the point of exoneration.”

He uses a lot of alliteration, which surprised me. Here are some examples:
“naturally not” “particular province” “rather remote” “quality in question”


“We know from psycho-analytic experience […] that fear of damaging or losing one’s eyes is terrible one in children.” what experience is he talking about? Wouldn’t adults be just as fearful? Most kids I know don’t even think about loosing their eyes. How does he jump from that to castration? Does he think that because people are blind they are scared that they won’t be able to see when someone is hacking off their penis? What about women? Do we have this fear of castration?

Funny how he brings us no statistics and only references to someone else’s fiction. He does not even offer a thought experiment or other possibilities. He believes in what he says and to him the world is very clearly organized and explainable, and because he believes in what he says so strongly, he expects us to do the same.

There “seems” to be a contradiction, but then he tries to convince us that it is only a “complication” which is really that we fear ourselves and the destruction of our ego. Hum… I don’t know how many people bought this then. Seems more like psudo-philosophy than anything else. And his example with the Egyptians might be partially right except 1) they were not the first artist 2) he neglects the whole religious aspect of their “art” which was really a way of story telling 3) early art also depicted animals and other things besides humans, how would he explain that?

I think he does, however, make some points about the general feeling of uncanny and he also identifies appropriate situations where one would sense it, but his analysis of why we feel that way is insane. Yes people feel threaten and so they are scared, but that’s very different from being scared and wanting to crawl back into the womb.

I want to see a conversation between Freud and Darwin.

His prose is excellent though. He makes good use of imagery, has varying sentence structure. His thoughts are clear yet ornately described.