The romantic imagination as neurosis? The Freudian debate on animism and the question of sight in E. T. A. Hoffmann

Abstract

This paper takes up Freud’s analysis of Der Sandmann (1816), embodied in a 1919 article which proved itself paradigmatic to interpretations of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s work. In this article, the father of psychoanalysis renders several judgments about the argumentative structure of the romantic novella which, in Literary Studies, have been improperly attributed to Hoffmann himself. His aesthetical program would namely be one of an analyst of psychical mechanisms of his characters, thus revealing the author as an odd pundit of psychoanalytic theories much before their inception. It is as if the setup of the horrifying fantasy which characterizes his prose should come along an interpretative urge of the hidden areas of the psyche, so as to discredit irrational and animist tendencies in his characters. Freud’s critique of animism is one of the most contested by recent scholar such as Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers. Hence, some of their arguments will be recovered at a second moment of this article in order that we go back to Hoffmann and reinterpret his aesthetics as a defense of a certain type of animism, beyond the psychoanalytic paradigm that never ceased to overshadow it.