Image & Narrative, Vol 13, No 1 (2012) 21 Freud and Hoffmann, once again
Tan Wälchli
Abstract: Starting with the embedded narrative from E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Serapion’s Brothers, this article relates the poetical concept of “semblance of life”, or the seemingly alive image with theological debates from the early 19th century and relates it to Achim von Arnim’s stagings of the Golem-figure. Both Hoffmann and Arnim adopted a poetological concept of ‘body without soul’ that is meant polemically against Classicist and pre-romantic notion of the poet as imitator of God.
Résumé : Commençant avec le récit enchâssé d’E.T.A. Hoffmann Les Frères Sérapion, cet article établit les relations entre le concept poétique de « semblant de vie » ou d’image animé avec les débats théologiques du début du XIXe siècle et rapporte cette question aux mises en scènes de la figure du Golem par Achim von Arnim. Hoffmann aussi bien qu’Arnim ont adopté un concept poétologique de « corps sans âme » mobilisé à des fins polémiques contre la notion classique et pré-romantique du poète comme imitateur de Dieu.
Keywords: "animism/animation", "Hoffmann", "repression", "Christianity"
Freud and Hoffmann: is there anything new to be said about this pairing? More than ninety years after the publication of The Uncanny (1919), Hoffmann is still widely considered to be “the unrivalled master of the uncanny in literature” (Freud 1919, 233). Freud’s oedipal reading of The Sand-Man (1817), on the other hand, lost its credibility a long time ago, at some point in the 1970s and 1980s, when psychoanalysis was under attack for alleged “phallogocentrism” (Derrida 1987, 480-81). Today, it is almost certain that no-one in literary studies would place money on Freud’s claims that the “uncanny effect of the Sand-Man” derives from “the anxiety belonging to the castration complex of childhood” (Freud 1919, 233), and that “the doll that appears to be alive” (i.e. Olympia) is uncanny because it recalls an “infantile belief” which lets children treat “their dolls like live people” (233). In short, Freud was convinced that uncanny appearances in (late) Romantic literature could be “trace[d] back to infantile psychology” (238), and he thus, according to widespread opinion, unwittingly delivered abundant evidence that psychoanalytic readings of literary works produce, to say the least, highly doubtful results.
Image & Narrative, Vol 13, No 1 (2012) 22 In what follows, however, I intend to argue that this widely-held belief is in itself highly dubious. It is, indeed, my aim to re-introduce Freud into the discussion of Hoffmann’s work, based on the conviction that there is more to be gained from Freud’s analysis than has hitherto been noticed. In particular, I propose to take into account a second concept of the uncanny which Freud presents in the course of his commentary on Hoffmann and which does not draw on infantile psychology. Instead, it is rooted in Freud’s analysis of cultural history, which he had previously presented in Totem and Taboo (1913). Drawing on this concept of a cultural uncanny, I shall then engage in a reading of Hoffmann. Here again I propose to modify the conventional approach, since my primary focus is not on The Sand-Man, but on a later theoretical text, in which Hoffmann, once again, deals with puppets that - like Olympia - appear to be alive.
The cultural uncanny: animism returned
As is clear from his comments on the Sand-Man and Olympia, Freud thought that uncanny feelings were caused by a dialectic of repression and the (partial) return of the repressed. According to this theory, uncanny phenomena can be traced back to certain “beliefs” from early childhood, which had later “become alienated from”, and thus frightening to, the mind of the adult “through the process of repression” (241). In other words, while the child feels threatened by castration and believes that it is surrounded by living dolls, the adult has abandoned these ideas. However, under certain circumstances s/he is still haunted by them. Freud explains this dialectic of repression and return in greater detail when he discusses the uncanny figure of the Doppelgänger. Again the background is provided by Hoffmann, this time by his novel The Devil’s Elixirs (1815/16). In addition, Freud refers to a study by his disciple, Otto Rank.
[T]he “double” was originally an insurance against the destruction of the ego, an “energetic denial of the power of death”, as Rank says […]. The same desire led the Ancient Egyptians to develop the art of making images of the dead in lasting materials. Such ideas, however, have sprung from the soil of the unbounded self-love, from the primary narcissism which dominated the mind of the child and of primitive man. But when this stage has been surmounted, the “double” reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death. […] [T]he quality of uncanniness can only come from the fact of the double being a creation dating back to a very early mental stage, long since
Image & Narrative, Vol 13, No 1 (2012) 23 surmounted - a stage, incidentally, at which it wore a more friendly aspect. The “double” has become a thing of terror, just as, after the collapse of their religion, the gods turned into demons. (235–36)
According to this understanding, the uncanniness of the doppelganger can be explained in the same way as the uncanniness of the Sand-Man or of Olympia. Here, too, we discover that an old belief, long since abandoned, suddenly returns in the life of the adult, thereby appearing threatening. Yet this paragraph introduces a new element to the scenario: in this case, the “very early mental stage”, in which the old beliefs were harboured, does not just refer to “the child”, but also to “primitive man”. Thus Freud is not simply concerned with psychology, but with cultural history as well. In the same way that the child once believed in living dolls and in his double, so too did primitive man. Freud explains this parallel in greater detail in a further paragraph, in which he subsumes several of the old beliefs under the term “animism”.
It seems as if each one of us has been through a phase of individual development corresponding to this animistic stage in primitive men, that none of us has passed through it without preserving certain residues and traces of it which are still capable of manifesting themselves, and that everything which now strikes us as “uncanny” fulfils the condition of touching those residues of animistic mental activity within us and bringing them to expression. (240–41)
At the end of this passage Freud inserts a footnote, which refers to chapter III of Totem and Taboo. This seems to make sense, as in this chapter Freud is not only concerned with “Animism, Magic, Omnipotence of Thoughts” (Freud 1913, 75), but he also establishes a parallel between individual and collective history, comparing the life of an individual with the development of culture. In both texts Freud seems to be interested in a cultural history of what he calls “animism”. And what he adds in the later text is the notion of an uncanny return of animism.
But how exactly are we to think of a cultural history of animism and its return? When did ‘primitive man’ abandon his early beliefs, and when did they come back? Did, for example, the return occur immediately after the ancient beliefs had been overcome, or was there a period of latency, during which these beliefs were more successfully abandoned? Freud left these questions open, but a few commentators on The Uncanny have since tried to find an answer. The first to address the issue is Terry Castle, who suggests that the “historical transformation” on which “the Freudian uncanny depends” (1995, 10) is a more recent one than Freud’s examples such as that of ancient Egyptian images would suggest. For Castle, the
Image & Narrative, Vol 13, No 1 (2012) 24 crucial historical process is “rationalization”, and she states that “it was during the eighteenth century with its […] self-conscious valorization of ‘reason’ over ‘superstition’, that human beings first experienced” (10) the uncanny. According to this reading, repression and return take place more or less simultaneously, and Freud’s so called “primitive man” can be understood in a fairly general way as a pre-enlightenment subject. One might speak of a “medieval” or an “early modern” subject, for whom reason is not yet the absolute goal.
A few years after Castle, Tom Gunning outlined a slightly different concept of the cultural uncanny. While Gunning initially followed Castle in suggesting that major occurrences of the uncanny took place “in the late eighteenth century” (2003, 7), he has more recently modified this approach. He explains that while he was convinced “that there is a modern uncanny”, he “would never claim that the uncanny is exclusively a modern phenomenon” (Gunning 2008, 68). This would mean that in addition to the ‘modern’ uncanny -- appearing in the late eighteenth century -- we must also consider earlier forms of the uncanny. And this opens up the possibility of taking into account periods of latency, since, if the manifestation of the uncanny occurred several times, the first abandonment of ancient beliefs might have significantly preceded its return in the eighteenth century.
In my opinion, Gunning’s rather flexible historiography of the uncanny is very useful. It allows us to understand why most of the examples which Freud cites as instances of animism in The Uncanny concern very old phenomena, such as the immortal images of the dead in ancient Egypt. When Freud proposes such examples, or when he speaks more generally of “primitive” beliefs, he clearly refers to practices whose abandonment preceded the eighteenth century. The same can be observed in Totem and Taboo, where Freud once again mentions ancient Egypt (“the sun-god Ra” – Freud 1913, 79), as well as several cultures of indistinct “primitive races” (82).
In Totem and Taboo, Freud also situates animism in a wider context, which proves to be illuminating with regard to the question addressed here. He distinguishes three “systems of thought”, which mankind has developed “in the course of the ages”: “animistic (or mythological), religious and scientific” (77). According to this view animism is not simply Egyptian or primitive, but also “mythic”, or, in other words, Greek. Moreover, when Freud describes the second stage as “religious”, he draws on a Latin term which became foundational for Christianity. We might therefore conclude that, for Freud, the notion of “animism” encompasses all kinds of pre-Christian cultures. This might explain why he draws together so many different things under one label: he would thereby mimic the Christian way
Image & Narrative, Vol 13, No 1 (2012) 25 of subsuming every culture preceding Christianity under terms such as “pagan” or “heathen”. As for the third stage, “science”, this could then be associated above all with Enlightenment and modernity, representing a further development within Christian culture.
Such a reading of Totem and Taboo, highlighting the opposition between animism on the one hand and Christianity on the other, might concur with Jacques Lacan’s observation that the analysis of Christianity stands at the very centre of Freud’s essay (cf. Lacan 1992, 175–8). But did Freud use the same dichotomy of animism and Christianity in The Uncanny? This, at least, is what Freud’s footnote referring to Totem and Taboo seems to imply. And the assumption is confirmed by another footnote in The Uncanny, one that refers to Heinrich Heine’s Gods in Exile (1853). It occurs at the end of the paragraph on the doppelganger quoted above. Thus the last sentence of this paragraph -- “The ‘double’ has become a thing of terror, just as, after the collapse of their religion, the gods turned into demons” -- is to be read as a reference to Heine. And this is what Heine writes at the outset of Gods in Exile:
I am speaking here of that metamorphosis into demons which the Greek and Roman gods underwent when Christianity achieved supreme control of the world. The superstition of the people ascribed to those gods a real but cursed existence, coinciding entirely in this respect with the teaching of the Church. The latter by no means declared the ancient gods to be myths, inventions of falsehood and error, as did the philosophers, but held them to be evil spirits, who, through the victory of Christ, had been hurled from the summit of their power […] (1853, 268).
While Heine is exclusively concerned with “the Greek and Roman gods”, rather than with Egyptian images or animism, his description comes close to Freud’s theory of the uncanny. Both authors analyse a process in cultural history, in the course of which old beliefs, after having been overcome, persist in some way. And both authors observe that in this process the objects of the old belief undergo a transformation, turning from something friendly into something threatening. In making this observation I do not wish to suggest that Freud’s theory is directly taken over from Heine (with whose work he was undoubtedly very familiar). But in my opinion, the inter-textual relation, established by Freud himself, indicates that he was interested in a similar model of historical transformation to Heine, and, moreover, in the same historical moment of transformation. This would confirm that The Uncanny does indeed operate with the same dichotomy of animism and Christianity that Freud had developed in Totem and Taboo.
Image & Narrative, Vol 13, No 1 (2012) 26 Following the references to Totem and Taboo and to Gods in Exile, I therefore come to suggest that Freud’s historiography of the uncanny may be sketched out as follows: 1) early “childhood”, in which men held all kinds of animistic beliefs, designates pre-Christian culture in general; 2) the “adult” age, in which animism is repressed, corresponds to the Christian era. Within Christianity, two further stages might be distinguished: first, a dogmatic, medieval period of Roman “religion”; second, an enlightened, modern age of “science”. Such a distinction within Christianity seems not to have been present in Heine’s Gods in Exile, but according to Freud it is significant. Given that most of Freud’s examples of the uncanny stem from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we might conclude that while the return of animism can take place in both “adult” ages, it is more likely to occur in the “scientific” era. In contrast, the “religious” age, according to Freud, seems to have allowed for a more successful abandonment of the old beliefs, and it might therefore be understood, at least in part, as a period of latency.
The uncanny return of animism in Hoffmann
Setting out from Freud’s concept of the cultural uncanny, I now propose a new reading of Hoffmann’s work. Among the aforementioned examples, it would seem most promising to analyse The Devil’s Elixir, the one novel by Hoffmann in which the Doppelgängers appear. Since these figures haunt a monk who leaves the monastery and engages in all kinds of sinful adventures, the uncanny here seems to arise from the partly failed establishment of Christianity. In addition, some commentators have convincingly suggested that the monk’s sins can be traced back to Greek antiquity, as his life is ‘prototypically’ prefigured by his great-great-grandfather’s renunciation of Christianity and embracing of Greek art (cf. Negus 1958, 517–8; Meixner 1971, 166–85). The great-great-grandfather was a Renaissance painter, who at some point started to imitate the lifestyle and art of ancient Greece, and who produced a living, female image which he later married. Thus, much as in Freud’s theory, the prototypical uncanny phenomenon arises when the Christian subject falls back into a pre-Christian -- in this case, Greek -- culture of what might be called “animism”, so that s/he is caught between old beliefs and the new Christian world.
However, I do not intend to focus primarily on The Devil’s Elixirs, since it is often argued that this novel occupies a special position in Hoffmann’s work. He wrote it in a very short time, apparently for the sole purpose of earning money after having lost his job as a conductor in Dresden in 1814. And it is one of very few texts by Hoffmann to be set in a
Image & Narrative, Vol 13, No 1 (2012) 27 distinctively Christian milieu. Given this particular status, it is often assumed that The Devil’s Elixirs is not representative of a larger body of Hoffmann’s work. It would therefore be questionable to take this very novel as the main reference for the uncanny in Hoffmann.
Instead, I suggest focusing on an important theoretical text which Hoffmann wrote during the last years of his life: the frame narrative to the collection, The Serapion Brethren. The collection was published in four volumes between 1819 and 1821, shortly before Hoffmann died in 1822. Most of the novellas had appeared in print previously, but the frame narrative was new. It tells the story of four (later six) friends who meet to read their novellas - i.e. Hoffmann’s assembled works - to each other and to discuss them critically. This allows Hoffmann to re-evaluate his works retrospectively, and he thereby takes into consideration other authors, which he lets the friends discuss by way of comparison. It is widely assumed that these critical debates provide a fertile source for a study of Hoffmann’s poetics (cf. Steinecke 2004, 365–6, Brown 2006, 5).
Central to these poetics is the so-called “Serapiontic principle”, which the friends establish at the beginning of the frame narrative, and which provides a set of rules for “good” poetry. However, I am more interested in how the friends define “bad” poetry, since it is in this context that we encounter notions that come close to descriptions of uncanny figures such as living dolls. For example, when the friends speak of “deceptive puppets” (Hoffmann, 68), or when they criticise poetic works that produce “no youthful liveliness but only a dull, squinting semblance of life [Scheinleben]” (1113), we might be reminded of Olympia in The Sand-Man or the living image in the The Devil’s Elixir.** I therefore suggest that some of the poetological concepts which Hoffmann develops in the frame narrative come very close to certain motifs he uses in his novellas.
This, in turn, would mean that his uncanny stories about living images or puppets could also be read as poetical works. A character such as the great-great-grandfather of the monk, who marries a living image, that is, a semblance of life, would be marked as a “bad” artist. And the same would be true for a protagonist such as Nathanael, who, in The Sand-Man, is deceived by the puppet Olympia. In these famous novels, as much as in the frame narrative of The Serapion Brethren, the “bad” poet is the one who believes that works of art can come to live. And although this belief is not borne out by his creation, he ignores the failure, as he mistakes mere “puppets” or “semblances of life” for actual human beings.
This characterisation of “bad” poetry, in my opinion, invites a comparison with Freud’s notion of the cultural uncanny: we might say that for Hoffmann, the “bad” poet is
Image & Narrative, Vol 13, No 1 (2012) 28 haunted by the old animistic view of the word, since he thinks that images, puppets or works of art in general can come alive. But what kind of “primitive” animism would be so closely related to art? While we might think, again, of those Egyptian immortal images of the dead which Freud mentions in The Uncanny, another historical background seems to be more relevant to Hoffmann: namely, the myth of Pygmalion, who had created a living sculpture. In the course of the eighteenth century this myth had been used as a popular, albeit ambivalent model for artistic creation in works by a.o. Rousseau, Winckelmann and Herder (cf. Koschorke 1997; Mülder-Bach 1998). It seems plausible that it is this Pygmalion model which Hoffmann is criticising.
In a further passage from the frame narrative of The Serapion Brethren, however, yet another kind of animism is brought to mind. Shortly after the friends have introduced the notion of Scheinleben, they criticise certain works of art for their “lack” of “true spirit” and of “the divine life-giving breath [göttlich belebende Atem]”(1114–15). This, again, seems to be in accordance with Freud’s notion of animism, because when the “bad” artist ignores the lack of breath, he falsely believes that his creation is animated. Yet this time the cultural background of animism is neither Egyptian nor Greek, but rather biblical. Hoffmann quotes Genesis 2.7: “The LORD God formed man from the dust of the earth. He blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being.”
The quotation appears strange for at least two reasons. First, it seems unclear whether it is an actual quote, since the friends use it as if it were everyday language. This might be understood as an ironic play on the part of Hoffmann - he would use the biblical notion of “divine life-giving breath” as if it was a mere metaphor. Second, it is far from evident why this biblical notion should be introduced in the context of a poetological discussion. In what sense could the divine creation of mankind be understood as an artistic creation?
The answer is to be found in a similar theological concept, which was well-known at the beginning of the nineteenth century: the golem. This is a term which appears in Ps. 139:16, and which in a Talmudic legend (Sanh. 38b) came to be associated with the body of Adam as it existed prior to the act of animation carried out by the divine breath of life. According to this reading, the golem can be understood as a living “body without soul” (Scholem 1974, 351). But when Christian writers such as Jacob Grimm and Achim von Arnim adopted the notion, they introduced it into a poetological debate. They did so on the basis of the Christian assumption that Adam has to be understood as a kind of living image, namely as an “image” or “likeness” of God (imago dei). In this context, the creation of a
Image & Narrative, Vol 13, No 1 (2012) 29 golem was understood as a failed attempt at creating a living image in the way that God had done, and thus the failure could be understood as an artistic one (cf. Graevenitz 1987, 217-224). As is the case in Hoffmann’s writing, the creation of a human being lacking the divine breath of God provided an example of “bad” art.
With regard to Freud’s concept of the uncanny, the example of the golem - or, more generally speaking, of an artistic creature lacking divine breath - is particularly striking, since here the old animistic belief is clearly a Christian one. The notion of imago dei is foreign to Judaism, and was most decisively introduced into Christianity by Augustine. Focusing on a second passage in the biblical story of creation, where man is described as a kind of “likeness” to God (Gen. 1.27), Augustine added the Platonic notion of eikon, which in Latin translations became imago (cf. Didi-Huberman 1995, 45-59). Denoting a kind of living image, this Christian concept of imago dei can be subsumed under the heading of “animism” in the Freudian sense. And this seems to undermine Freud’s assumption that animism is generally pre-Christian, while the uncanny return takes place in Christianity.
However, we have to be aware here that the notion of man as imago dei, while in some senses crucial for Christianity, was at the same time already abandoned. When Augustine interpreted Adam as an imago dei, he also emphasised that, after the Fall, the likeness of man to God had become distorted. In reality man does not exist as imago dei and living images are impossible. Thus the very animistic concept that had been so crucial for Christianity had also been overcome by it. And when much later notions of living images - or, more general, of living works of art - returned, Christianity was confronted with an uncanny apparition that stemmed, at least to some extent, from its own repressed animism.
** English translations of Die Serapions-Brüder are my own -- with many thanks to Stephen Haswell-Todd for his help.
Works Cited:
Brown, Hilda Meldrum. E.T.A. Hoffmann and the Serapiontic Principle: Critique and Creativity. Rochester NY: Camden House, 2006.
Image & Narrative, Vol 13, No 1 (2012) 30 Castle, Terry. “Introduction.” The Female Thermometer, 3–20. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
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Freud, Sigmund. “Totem and Taboo (1913)”. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIII (1913-1914). Ed. James Strachey, vii– 162. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1955.
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Image & Narrative, Vol 13, No 1 (2012) 31 Koschorke, Albrecht. “Pygmalion als Kastrat – Grenzwertlogik der Mimesis”. Pygmalion: Die Geschichte des Mythos in der abendländischen Kultur. Ed. Matthias Mayer & Gerhard Neumann, 299-322. Freiburg i. Br.: Rombach, 1997.
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Negus, Kenneth G. “The Family Tree in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Die Elixiere des Teufels”. PMLA 73:5 (1958), 516–520.
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Tan Wälchli is a fellow of the Swiss National Research Fund and a postdoctoral researcher in the department for Germanic studies at the university of Chicago. He wrote his dissertation about Freud’s literary references (Poetik und Massenpsychologie, Berlin: Kadmos, 2010) and is working on the edge of fantastic, aesthetics and theology in Romanticism.
