Ghosts and the Psyche

Dienstag 18Dienstag 18Dienstag 18Dienstag 18----20 Uhr20 Uhr20 Uhr20 Uhr, UdL 6, , UdL 6, , UdL 6, , UdL 6, 3031303130313031

Email: simone.natale@huEmail: simone.natale@huEmail: simone.natale@huEmail: simone.natale@hu----berlin.deberlin.deberlin.deberlin.de

Dr. Simone NataleGastdozent

Vielfalt der WissensformenHumboldt Universitat zu Berlin

Sommersemester 2014

Summary of last week’s lesson

• Ghosts and cultures of death

• Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present (1974).

• Ghosts and the culture of mourning (Trauer)

Topics for today’s class: ghosts and the psyche

1. Emergence of the link between the ghost and mental states (psychology)

2. Terry Castle’s theory on the “spectralization of the mind”

3. Freud’s Das Unheimliche

Ghost as apparition / vision / illusion

• Specter (n.) c.1600, "frightening ghost," from French spectre "an image, figure, ghost" (16c.), from Latin spectrum "appearance, vision, apparition" (see spectrum). Figurative sense "object of dread" is from 1774.

• Phantom (n.) c.1300, fantum "illusion, unreality," from Old French fantosme (12c.), from Vulgar Latin *fantauma, from Latin phantasma"an apparition" (see phantasm). The ph- was restored in English late 16c. (see ph). Meaning "specter, spirit, ghost" is attested from late 14c.; that of "something having the form, but not the substance, of a real thing" is from 1707.

Ghosts and the mind in today’s language

• Expressions linking ghosts to states of mind:

• “The ghosts in your head”• “A thought that haunts me”• …

• What does it mean “to see a ghost”? And why do we use ghostly metaphors in our everyday language in order to describe thoughts and mental states?

Terry Castle on the “spectralizationof the mind”

• Terry Castle, historian of literature, currently Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University.

• Book “The Female Thermometer,” published in 1995 (available as pdf in our Moodle page)

Spectralization of the mind

• Question: When does the ghost becomes a metaphor for our mental states, our thoughts? And which are the consequences?

• Analysis of Ann Radcliffe’s novel The Mysteries of Udolpho(1794)(German edition: Udolphos Geheimnisse)

The Mysteries of Udolpho

• Archetypal Gothic novel, great popular success

• Theme of the supernatural / ghost

• Rational explanations: the ghost is the product of our imagination and of superstition

Castle’s analysis of The Mysteries of Udolpho

“Old-fashioned ghosts (in the Mysteries of Udolpho) have disappeared from the fictional world, but a new kind of apparition takes their place. To be a Radcliffean hero or heroine means just this: to be ‘haunted’, to find oneself possessed by spectral images of those one loves. One sees in the mind’s eye those who are absent; one is befriended and consoled by phantoms of the beloved” (Castle 1995, p. 123).

--> Link with shifts in the process of mourning, which increasingly becomes a more private issue (see Ariès on mourning in our society)

A new perception of human experience

“In the moment of romantic self-absorption, the other was indeed reduced to a phantom – a purely mental effect, or image, as it were, on the screen of consciousness itself. The corporeality of the other – his or her actual life in the world –became strangely insubstantial and indistinct: what mattered was the mental picture, the ghost, the haunting image” (Castle 1995, p. 125).

--> “Spectralization” of the other: romantic conviction that the dead and the absent lives in our mind

Francisco Goya,

“El sueño de la razón

produce monstruos,”

1797-99

The spectralization of the mind today

“The twentieth century, I hope to show, has completely naturalized this historic shift toward the phantasmatic. We are used to the metaphor of the haunted consciousness – indeed hardly recognize it as metaphoric. Often enough, we speak colloquially of being haunted by memories or pursued by images of people inside our heads. (…) Not coincidentally, the most influential of modern theories of the mind –psychoanalysis – has internalized the ghost-seeing metaphor” (Castle 1995, p. 125).

Rationalist discourses and the spectralizationof the mind

• Castle: “The rationalists did not so much negate the traditional spirit world as displace it into the realm of psychology”

--> Ghosts are internalized

Spiritualist debunking and rationalist discourses

Spiritualist debunking and rationalist discourses

Two explanations:

1. Ghosts as deception

2. Ghosts as creation of our mind( --> and therefore a subject for psychological inquiry)

Spiritualist debunking and rationalist discourses

Walter Cooper Dendy, senior surgeon at the Royal Infirmary for Children, equates ghosts to an intense idea (idée fixe):

“It is as easy to believe in the power of mind in conjuring up a spectre

as in entertaining a simple thought; it is not strange that this thought

may appear embodied, especially if the external senses be shut; do we

not see a form in our mind’s eye, and if this idea be intensely defined, does it not become a phantom?”

Psychoanalysis and the spectralization of the mind

• Freud: what the mind rejects in one form may return to another

• Ghosts as the dead who returns --> ghosts as the repressed image who returns(According to Castle, Psychoanalysis would have not been thinkable without the spectralization of the mind in Western societies)

Freud’s “Das Unheimliche” (1919)

• English translation: the Uncanny

• Interest in the issue of belief but also in literature and other fictional representations of uncanny phenomena

--> Double life (religious belief + fictional representation) of ghosts and other uncanny manifestations

Freud on the meaning of “unheimlich”

„Das deutsche Wort »unheimlich« ist offenbar der Gegensatz zu heimlich, heimisch, vertraut und der Schluß liegt nahe, es sei etwas eben darum schreckhaft, weil es nicht bekannt und vertraut ist.“

But Freud also notes that „heimlich unter den mehrfachen Nuancen seiner Bedeutung auch eine zeigt, in der es mit seinem Gegensatz unheimlich zusammenfällt. Das heimliche wird dann zum unheimlichen. (…) Wir werden überhaupt daran gemahnt, daß dies Wort heimlich nicht eindeutig ist, sondern zwei Vorstellungskreisen zugehört, (…) dem des Vertrauten, Behaglichen und dem des Versteckten, Verborgen gehaltenen.“

Ambivalence

• Heimlich seems to mean two opposing things simultaneously:1) Belonging to the house or the family, or regarded as so belonging; 2) Concealed, kept from sight, so that others do not get to know about it, withheld from others

„Also heimlich ist ein Wort, das seine Bedeutung nach einer Ambivalenz hin entwickelt, bis es endlich mit seinem Gegensatz unheimlich zusammenfällt. Unheimlich ist irgendwie eine Art von heimlich.“

Types of things that arouse sense of the uncanny

• Inanimate objects that seem animate and vice versa

• Doubles/confounding of self/other- double first as assurance of immortality, later as harbinger of death

Types of things that arouse sense of the uncanny

• Involuntary/unintended returns- Freud’s example of ending up over and over in the red light district

• Involuntary repetition (e.g. numbers repeating several times during a day)

• Attitude towards death

Animism

„Die Analyse der Fälle des Unheimlichen hat uns zur alten Weltauffassung des Animismus zurückgeführt, die ausgezeichnet war durch die Erfüllung der Welt mit Menschengeistern (…). Es scheint, daß wir alle in unserer individuellen Entwicklung eine diesem Animismus der Primitiven entsprechende Phase durchgemacht haben, daß sie bei keinem von uns abgelaufen ist, ohne noch äußerungsfähige Reste und Spuren zu hinterlassen, und daß alles, was uns heute als »unheimlich« erscheint, die Bedingung erfüllt, daß es an diese Reste animistischer Seelentätigkeit rührt und sie zur Äußerung anregt“

Ghosts and Unheimliche

• Das Unheimliche as something that comes back: „Das Unheimliche sei etwas, was im Verborgenen hätte bleiben sollen und hervorgetreten ist.“

„Im allerhöchsten Grade unheimlich erscheint vielen Menschen, was mit dem Tod, mit Leichen und mit der Wiederkehr der Toten, mit Geistern und Gespenstern zusammenhängt.“

Death and animistic beliefs

“Aber auf kaum einem anderen Gebiet hat sich unser Denken und Fühlen seit den Urzeiten so wenig verändert, ist das Alte unter dünner Decke so gut erhalten geblieben, wie in unserer Beziehung zum Tode. (…) Da fast alle von uns in diesem Punkt noch so denken wie die Wilden, ist es auch nicht zu verwundern, daß die primitive Angst vor dem Toten bei uns noch so mächtig ist und bereit liegt, sich zu äußern, sowie irgend etwas ihr entgegen kommt.“

Psychoanalysis and the spectralization of the mind

• Das Unheimliche as the return of the repressed (the primitive animistic beliefs + the repressed events of childhood)

• Ghosts are creations of our mental life, of our psychological life --> spectralization of the mind

Next week

The Cat and the Canary (USA 1927), directed by Paul Leni

Danke!simone.natale@hu-berlin.de