Global Journal of Human-Social Science, A: Arts and Humanities, Volume 21 Issue 12

When Freud, in his 1919 article Das Unheimliche , asks himself about people, things and situations capable of awakening in us this feeling of strangeness – which we agree to associate with the aesthetic experience –, he evokes a series of examples such as the intellectual uncertainty facing an automaton, that is, whether a character is alive or dead (definition proposed by E. Jentsch); the astonishment caused by fits of madness or epilepsy; the belief in superstitions – which meets the magical thinking of children and certain neurotics –; situations connected to the universe of animism, magic, witchcraft and death; and several situations in which the barrier separating reality from fantasy has fade d 12 The image of witchcraft and demonic possession that surrounds hysteria thus accounts in large part for the disquieting feeling of strangeness that relates, on the one hand, to the recognition of insanity in the deepest SELF and, on the other, to what there is of primitive and childish in every neurotic. Freud emphasizes, in 1919, that “the infantile elements in this, which also dominates the minds of neurotics, is the over-accentuation of psychic reality in comparison with material reality – a feature closely allied to the belief in the omnipotence of thoughts.” . 13 The discovery of hysteria allowed the construction of a new look at the feminine. Yet, one must not assume that hysteria is a disease of women. However, the hysterical subject–male or female – always wonders what it is to be a woman. “Who am I?” is the question with which Breton's narrative, Nadja, begins. It is also the question of Dora, alias Ida Baue r The infantile and the primitive resist in the depths of our souls, and the feeling of strangeness linked to the superstitions, the magical thoughts, the intuitions, the hidden forces, and the beliefs in the return of the dead – conditions assumed by our ancestors as real and indisputable – continue to live within us, in what remains of primitive in us. 14 12 Freud, The Uncanny , in. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated from the german by James Strachey. Volume XVII (1917 – 1919). London: The Hogarth Press. P. 226 – 245. 13 Freud, The Uncanny, op. cit. p. 244 14 A young woman affected by hysterical symptoms who became the emblematic case of hysteria in Freudian teaching, the famous case of Dora. . What is a woman? How to become a desirable woman in a man's eyes (in the father's eyes)? At the same time, the hysterical man wonders what a woman wants – a question that makes the feminine always obscure and frightening. This harrowing experience of the man before the woman appears constantly in analytical work and also in literature. In Hoffman's tale The Sandman, as well as in Jensen's novel Gradiva – the latter, analyzed by Freud in 1906 –, we see how protagonists Nathanaël and Norbert abdicate the real woman in favor of an amorous relationship with the idealized, “fantasized” woman. In Norbert's spirit, “'the female gender had until then been [...] nothing but a concept made of marble or bronze, and he had never given the slightest attention to those who were, to him, the contemporary representatives of such gender'” 15 In Hoffman's tale, things happen similarly. Nathanaël believed having found in the eyes of the doll Olympia the flame of an eternal love: “– Sensitive and profound soul!" cried Nathanaël as he entered his room, "You alone, you alone in the world know how to understand me!" He shivered with happiness, dreaming of the intellectual exchanges that existed between Olympia and him and that grew each day. ” . Norbert, fully immersed in his science and away from mundane pleasures, had transferred his interest in the living woman to the stone woman. The love of his youth had turned into a bas-relief – a beautiful example of the sublimation of desire. His dream, which shows the transformation of the walking Gradiva into a stone image, is the metaphor, Freud emphasizes, of this process of repression through which erotic love becomes “forgotten”. The oneiric contents, which should remain unconscious, try, however, to bring this stone image back into a living woman. Dreams thus become harrowing and frightening, since they touch on the issue of a carefully repressed libidinal fantasy. The young man, whose keen interest in science contrasts with a sexual inhibition, flees as soon as he notices, even unknowingly of why, the threatening signs of Zoé's proximity. 16 These diabolical, possessed and passionate women of the past have become the emblematic figures of psychoanalysis. It is true that the neuroses of our The young man had completely forgotten about his bride, whom he had once loved. Clara, in her serenity and her silent, lucid nature, seemed now, in Nathanaël's eyes, cold and indifferent. He thus let the real woman, the erotic love, escape for the benefit of the idealized woman – the fate of which is an inescapably unsatisfactory relationship –, just like the neurotic's childish attitude towards the impasses of sexual difference and the enigma of the feminine. 15 Freud, Le délire et les rêves dans la "Gradiva" de W. Jensen, in The Oeuvres complètes de psychanalyse, vol. VIII, translated from German by Janine Altounian, Pascale Haller and Daniel Hartmann, Paris, PUF, 2007, p. 47. 16 Hoffmann, L'homme au sable, in Contes fantastiques II, translation by Loève-Veimars, Paris, Flammarion, 1980, p. 248. © 2021 Global Journals Volume XXI Issue XII Version I 19 ( ) Global Journal of Human Social Science - Year 2021 A Hysteria as an Aesthetic Expression