“Man should not play God” - Fiendishly Ambitious Fathers and Their Traumatised Mechanical Children in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman”  Boglarka Toth College

Sigmund Freud’s interpretation on the notion of the unheimlich, or as it was translated into English, the uncanny, in his 1919 essay with the same title was famously supported by his unique literary analysis of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s short story originally called “Der Sandmann.” To discover the roots of our immediate inner uneasiness and horror after encountering something uncannily frightening, Freud attempted to collate his basic ideas with Hoffmann’s narrative and tried to reach a shared, adequate conclusion. Looking at “The Sandman” from a psychoanalytic point of view, for him the primal, infantile fear from castration proved to be the considerable driving force behind the uncanny effect coming from the vicious bogeyman of the text. The impression of uncanniness is also slightly supplemented by the presence and function of an automaton character, but, according to Freud, that and other references to mechanisation are not that crucially stressed out as originators of dread and terror. In my own analysis, I will argue that there are noticeably more aspects mentioned by Hoffmann that definitely relate to anxieties towards alchemical and mechanical experimentations, as well as their consequences, than Freud suggested. The...