The Sandman is a story written by Ernest TAHoffman. Sigmund Freud took it as a reference point for the construction of the concept of stranger or sinister in psychoanalysis. In addition, Jacques Lacan refers to history in his seminar “Angoisse”. part of the work “Contos Noturnos”, the Gothic genre of horror literature.
Psychoanalysis assumes that the sinister or the strange is a variant of anxiety. A “disturbing strangeness”, by which the known becomes strange, or the stranger becomes known, or both realities at the same time.
“Un expressed emotions never die. Sigmund Freud?
The concept of stranger explains why human beings are terrified of something that doesn’t exist or something we don’t know An example of this is the famous one?Coconut? Or “cuckoo,” a being that appears in many cultures, though it doesn’t even have physical representation. However, many people reach adulthood for fear of darkness. The root of these fears can be in the stories of these children like?What are you really afraid of?Anyway, it’s not on the outside, it’s on the inside.
Sandman’s story begins with Nathaniel’s childhood memories, as a child, before going to sleep, his mother told him it was time to go to bed, otherwise the sandman would come and throw sand in his eyes to close them. he was a fantasy, but a maid told him it was a real story.
According to this maid, this monstrous being was very bad, chasing children who did not want to sleep, pouring handfuls of sand into her eyes until they bled and left their orbits, so the sand merchant put his eyes on a bag and took them to the moon to serve as food for his children.
Nathaniel associated the sand merchant with a friend of his father’s. When he died, the boy thought this horrible being was to blame. Years later, he believes he can find this character again, through a sales barometer. Later, he falls in love with him. Olympia, who is an automaton, an inanimate being who believes he is a woman.
All this leads him to immerse himself in a spiral of madness and asylum. Then, apparently, it gets better; but at some point he thinks he’s seeing the sand trader again and flies him from a great height, causing his death.
Drawing on the story of O Homem da Areia, Freud shapes the concept of the sinister or the strange. It begins by doing a linguistic and etymological analysis of this concept. So you first conclude that it is the opposite extreme of the known and the familiar. However, as he deepens his studies, he also realizes that the word refers to what is hidden or secret and to the word “house. “
Through this analysis he achieves the meaning that Schelling gives to the outside, that is, what is supposed to remain hidden has appeared, then the ambiguity of the stranger appears: it is familiar (of the house) and at the same time it is something. Hidden Similarly, is this?
Freud realizes that, in the accident, he operates a mechanism by which something familiar becomes strange, this is what happens when someone dies: before he was someone close to him and now he is a corpse that is in an incomprehensible state, so would the demons and sinister spirits of the “beyond” be born.
In O Homem da Areia, the protagonist is afraid of losing his gaze, a fear that Freud associates with mutilation related to the castration complex, and finds a clear coincidence between the concept of repression and the subject of the accident, which would be the return of the repressed, of the repressed that is revealed. He then concludes that the accident is what leads to the anguish of the child’s castration complex.