# data[].attributes.headline
S. Freud - Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis

# data[].attributes.subject
S. Freud - Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis

# data[].attributes.headline
Brainstorming: What comes to mind when hearing "the Uncanny"? Share your associations (1 - 3 words) in the comments of this post.

# data[].attributes.subject
Brainstorming: What comes to mind when hearing "the Uncanny"? Share your associations (1 - 3 words) in the comments of this post.

# data[].attributes.body
In your groups, discuss the questions indicated below and post the results of your discussions in the comments (of the respective question)

# data[].attributes.body
1.  Getting started: Scan the text and note down a few phrases that best describe the notion of the uncanny.

# data[].attributes.headline
J. Kristeva - Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, psychoanalyst and feminist theorist

# data[].attributes.subject
J. Kristeva - Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, psychoanalyst and feminist theorist

# data[].attributes.headline
N. Abraham and M. Torok - Two Hungarian-French psychoanalysts, their collaboration began in the late 1960s

# data[].attributes.subject
N. Abraham and M. Torok - Two Hungarian-French psychoanalysts, their collaboration began in the late 1960s

# data[].attributes.headline
Brainstorming: What comes to mind when hearing "the Abject"? Post your associations (1 - 3 words) in the comments of this post.

# data[].attributes.subject
Brainstorming: What comes to mind when hearing "the Abject"? Post your associations (1 - 3 words) in the comments of this post.

# data[].attributes.body
In your groups, discuss the questions indicated below and post the results of your discussions in the comments (of the respective question)

# data[].attributes.headline
Brainstorming: What comes to mind when hearing "the Phantom"? Post your associations (1 - 3 words) in the comments of this post.

# data[].attributes.subject
Brainstorming: What comes to mind when hearing "the Phantom"? Post your associations (1 - 3 words) in the comments of this post.

# data[].attributes.body
In your groups, discuss the questions indicated below and post the results of your discussions in the comments (of the respective question)

# data[].attributes.body
1. Getting started: Scan the text and note down a few phrases that best describe the notion of the abject.

# data[].attributes.body
1. Getting started: Scan the text and note down a few phrases that best describe the notion of the phantom.

# data[].attributes.body
2. The abject in literature vs. film: How are Gothic horror literature and film “approaching abjection”? Think of the different tools each may use to elicit feelings of repugnance, abhorrence, abjection (imagery, camera techniques, etc.).

# data[].attributes.body
3. Identity in horror: On page 4, Kristeva states that what causes abjection is “[…] what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules […]”. Reflect on the implications of the abject in Gothic Horror narratives in terms of the forming of identity.

# data[].attributes.body
2.  In what ways is Freud´s theory of the uncanny connected to childhood perceptions of supernatural and eerie occurrences during early stages of development?

# data[].attributes.body
The subject of uncanny - belongs to all that is terrible and arouses creeping horror

The uncanny leads to something known, something familiar that has become frightening due to some circumstances

„The better orientated in his environment a person is, the less readily will he get the impression of some- thing uncanny in regard to the objects and events in it“.

Everything is uncanny that ought to have remained hidden and secret, and yet comes to light.

Psychoanalytic theory of the uncanny - uncanny is in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old—established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression.

What might be hidden in us, suddenly comes to light and frightens us. (from childhood for example) => The uncanny is related to beliefs in our childish selves, that we’ve repressed or hidden away from us in order to become adults

We cover these beliefs because they are wrong and we don’t want to be wrong.

Uncanny - fear that our child self was right all along.

The uncanny requires realism - ask us to believe that these situations happen in the real world; pretend to move in the world of common reality.

# data[].attributes.body
3.  What techniques do the author and the producer use to evoke a sense of the uncanny in “Crimson Peak” and “The Bloody Chamber”?

# data[].attributes.body
2. Describe the means through which the "phantom effect" is sustained and under which circumstances it potentially fades.

# data[].attributes.body
3. How are Gothic literature and film approaching the phantom? Discuss examples that come to mind.
(Crimson Peak ?)

# data[].attributes.body
How do the notions of the uncanny/ the abject/ the phantom differ or bear similarities to one another?

# data[].attributes.body
How do the notions of the uncanny/ the abject/ the phantom differ or bear similarities to one another?

# data[].attributes.body
How do the notions of the uncanny/ the abject/ the phantom differ or bear similarities to one another?

# data[].attributes.body
A film can be more explicit and brutal; the imagination of the reader is limited; horror can be evoked more rapidly e.g. jump scares, sound & music, lightning, animation of monsters, etc.

Crimson Peak (2015) Guillermo del Toro

(similarities to E.A. Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher 1839)
-Clay colors water/snow, the house is seemingly ”consumed” by the clay mine under the house: TC 41:23; 44:58; 1:46:3; sublime and abject in nature
-Ghostly appearances as misshapen skeletons, sometimes with indefinable indications for their murder (e.g. woman in the bathtub with an axe in her head TC 1:05:13), the brutality of Thomas's murder - explicit shot on how his sister stabs him in his face; corruption of beauty and family (TC 1:42:43)

-Doppelgänger motif as both abject and uncanny: Fear of the disembodiment of the soul from the body; human duality; where the double appears, boundaries between dream state & reality, and sanity & madness are blurred

Examples of the Double in Literature and Film:

Enemy (movie 2013) by Denis Villeneuve

Mary Reilly (movie 1996) by Stephen Frears & Christopher Hampton

Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson

William Wilson (1839) by Edgar Allan Poe

Pet Sematary (1983) Stephen King

Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) Oscar Wilde

-Frankenstein’s creature is a prototypical abject - a living corpse, an accumulation of body parts of many corpses combined to form a new one (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein 1818)

-Horror associated with blood is a central theme in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)

-The abject in Dracula: cannibalism, consumption of human blood, female vampire eating children, animal-like, corruption of the prototypical mother figure, and the female body/male gaze on the female body

-The inability to use a mirror - A mirror represents the 'I' or self, instead Dracula’s mirror image doesn’t exist and does therefore indicate his inhumanity, uncovering him as a creature that seemingly exists in a liminal space between life and death

-Abjection & art: Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities E 3 (2022) vs. The short story Pickman’s Model by H.P. Lovecraft (1926)

-Dark forms of art as a corrupter between reality and madness; the voyeur isn’t safe anymore

# data[].attributes.body
How do the notions of the uncanny/ the abject/ the phantom differ or bear similarities to one another?

Answer:
First of all, all of the theories contribute to the Gothic Theory and its evolution. A similarity that all of them bear is that both the effect uncanny, the abject and the phantom form/evoke in one’s unconscious/the child’s psyche.

Another similarity is the opposition every theory creates:

the uncanny: familiar and unfamiliar, heimlich and unheimlich.

abjection - the self and the other

Abjection is correlated to the uncanny, being the natural reaction of the I to what disturbs identity, to what does not respect borders, positions, and rules.

the phantom - human and ghost

Connection to the uncanny because the phantom represents family secrets (familiarity), but causes horror because these are buried/hidden secrets.

=> All of them being a way to understand reality (the distinction between imagination and reality). Due to them, we form our identities.

Differences?

Unlike the evocation of the uncanny which anchors within our subconsciousness, the abject is nothing familiar, but arises out of a pre-birth existence; it contains the violence of one’s separation from their mother and the (non)memory of pre-birth life

The abject is not an object itself, though some object may inspire it e.g. from exposure to bodily excretions such as blood, pus, and feces; also rotten food or milk, corpse... those elements can also be associated with the uncanny but are often less nuanced and more extreme, engendering revulsion by the act of the destruction of the self that often results in an inevitable and terminal process of uncanniness

Self vs. other; nourishment vs. poison; life vs. death; a subject vs. object

the abject forces us to form our identity by the rejection of the abject whereas the uncanny forces us to confront ourselves with what has been formerly repressed

the phantom is nothing either nothing familiar and repressed but rather carried through secrets from one generation to the next

all concepts are somehow unspecific and cannot be distinctly categorized; on the one hand, they stand apart from what we can identify with, and on the other hand, they allow us to evolve some kind of understanding and familiarity while facing the unknown

# data[].attributes.body
How do you evaluate psychoanalytic theories as a means of analyzing Gothic literature?

Answer:
To be an adult is to know the distinction between fantasy and reality, passionate longings and pragmatic limitation; and yet the adult psyche cannot escape the infantile wishes or desires formed by ourselves or society. We create those dreams for ourselves and for the others through the distinction between reality and the dream (literature). Gothic and Psychoanalysis are correlated because the gothic genre examines the themes of psychoanalysis: the uncanny when the distinction between reality and imagination is effaced

„Gothic novels, like psychoanalysis, explore the ostensibly irrational or distempered.“ => They both examine how people’s imagination (or the uncanny and mysterious) tells us more about one’s repressed guilt and fears.

=> All three psychoanalytical theories: the uncanny, the abjection and the phantom are great analytic tools for psychoanalytic literary criticism.