5 - Schnitzler and Freud: Uncanny Similarities?

Summary

In his 1919 essay “Das Unheimliche,” Sigmund Freud described the uncanny as the sudden revelation of that which has long remained hidden. “Uncanny” also describes the sensation when psychoanalysis has laid bare the determining forces that have besieged the patient. According to Michael Worbs, Freud knew what he was talking about. His long avoidance of meeting Schnitzler was an attempt to avoid the shock caused by the suddenly familiar, because he had been noticing in Schnitzler for some time those aspects in himself that had been left undeveloped, whether by choice or circumstance. Seeing his Doppelgänger Schnitzler would be an uncanny reminder of decisions he had made and subsequently repressed.

In his letter of May 14, 1922 extending congratulatory wishes on Schnitzler's sixtieth birthday, Freud attributes his avoidance behavior to his “Doppelgängerscheu,” because Schnitzler's discoveries through intuition and self-observation are uncanny correlates to his own clinical observations:

Ihr Determinismus wie Ihr Skepsis — was die Leute Pessimismus heißen — Ihr Ergriffensein von den Wahrheiten des Unbewußten, von der Triebnatur des Menschen, Ihre Zersetzung von den kulturellkonventionellen Sicherheiten, das Haften Ihrer Gedanken an der Polarität von Lieben und Sterben, das alles berührte mich mit einer unheimlichen Vertrautheit.

[Your determinism as well as your skepticism — what people call pessimism — your ability to be moved by the truths of the unconscious and by the instincts of human nature, your dissection of culturalconventional certainties, the way your thoughts adhere to the polarity of loving and dying — all of that touched me with an uncanny familiarity.]