Volume 23, Number 12 · July 15, 1976
Driving Out Demons
By Harold Bloom
The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales
by Bruno Bettelheim
Knopf, 328 pp., $12.50
Freud's essay on 'The Uncanny' (1919) can be said to have defined, for our century, what criticism once called the Sublime. An apprehension of a beyond or of the daemonic—a sense of transcendence—appears in literature or life, according to Freud, when we feel that something uncanny (unheimlich) is being represented, or conjured up, or at least intimated. Freud locates the source of the uncanny in our narcissistic and atavistic tendency to believe in 'the omnipotence of thought,' that is, in the power of our own or of others' minds over the natural world. The uncanny is thus a return to animistic conceptions of the universe, and is produced by the psychic defense Freud called repression, an unconsciously purposeful forgetting of drives that might menace our socially conditioned 'ego-ideals,' that is, the models we attempt to imitate.
Review, 2777 words
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