Discusses the psychoanalytical implications of Freud's ideas on Hoffmann's Sandman, along with its dominant themes and motifs. It also offers a criticism of Freudian ideas along with the popularity of Neo-Freudianism. Moreover, it also explains the importance of the symbolism of eyes.

1. .

2. A PSYCHOANALYTICAL
STUDY OF “THE SANDMAN”
Syeda Fatima Tuz Zahra,

3. 20TH CENTURY
• The century of Freud
• Sigmund Freud
• Austrian neurologist
• Born: May 6, 1856
• Died: September 23, 1939
• Developed therapeutic techniques
• Proved that, the unconscious mind governs
behavior to a greater degree than we suspect.

4. 20TH CENTURY
•Books were published like
•The Interpretation of
Dreams (1900),
•The Psychopathology of
Everyday Life (1901),
•The Introductory Lectures
on Psycho-Analysis (1915-1916)

5. PSYCHOANALYSIS
• It is defined as a set of psychological theories and
therapeutic techniques that have their origin in the
work and theories of Sigmund Freud.
• The core idea at the center of psychoanalysis is the
belief that all people possess unconscious thoughts,
feelings, desires, and memories.
• If these memories are troubling, should be cured.
• Scientifically valid

6. EVERYDAY USE
• Psychoanalytic concepts such as sibling rivalry, inferiority
complexes, and defense mechanisms are in such common use
that most of us feel we know what they mean without ever having
heard them defined.
• If you’ve ever told an angry friend “Don’t take it out on me!” you
were accusing that friend of displacement, which is the
psychoanalytic name for transferring our anger with one person
onto another person (usually one who won’t fight back or can’t
hurt us as badly as the person with whom we are really angry).
LOIS TYSON

7. CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS
• Song: “You Can’t Always Get What You
Want” by the Rolling Stones? The idea
expressed is “You can’t always get what
you want, but you get what you need.”
• Psychoanalytically: “You can’t always get
what you consciously want, but you get
what you unconsciously need.”
• Human beings are motivated, even
driven, by desires, fears, needs, and
conflicts of which they are unaware.

8. FREUD’S THREE LEVELS OF MIND
• The Conscious mind contains all of the thoughts, memories,
feelings and wishes which we are aware at any given
moment.This also include our memory,which is not always part of
our conscious.
• Sub conscious mind is like the storage point for any recent
memories needed for quick recall,such as name of a person etc.
• Unconscious mind is where all of our memories and past
experiences reside.These are those memories that have been
repressed through trauma and those have been consciously
forgotten.

10. ICEBERG METAPHOR OF MIND
• Freud is often quoted as saying,
“The mind is like an iceberg,it floats
with one-seventh of its bulk above
water.”
• He believes that our unconscious
wishes and desires can have a
great deal of influence over an
outward behavior.

11. THREE LEVELS OF UNCONSCIOUSNESS
• ID: Id always wants pleasure and wishes to fulfill the
desires and works on pleasure principle.
• EGO: It works on reality principle. The reality principle
weighs the costs and benefits of an action before
deciding to act upon or abandon impulses.
• Superego: It works on moral principle and is always
trying to get you to behave in a socially appropriate way.

12. .
.

13. OEDIPAL AND ELECTRA COMPLEX
The
“good-girl/b
ad-girl”
attitude
toward
women.

14. METHODOLOGY
• Qualitative and
Quantitative
• Literature Review has
quantitative elements.
• Analysis of “the
sandman” is dominantly
qualitative
• Descriptive Research:
Psychoanalysis and its
elements.

16. THE UNCANNY: 'STRANGE OR MYSTERIOUS,
ESPECIALLY IN AN UNSETTLING WAY'
•AN UNCANNY EFFECT OFTEN
ARISES WHEN THE
BOUNDARY BETWEEN
FANTASY AND REALITY IS
BLURRED, WHEN WE ARE
FACED WITH THE REALITY
OF SOMETHING THAT WE
HAVE UNTIL NOW
CONSIDERED IMAGINARY.

17. UNCANNY
• Freud described it as a ‘feeling
prompted by the return of the
repressed’. “Belongs to the realm of the
frightening, of what evokes fear and
dread”
• “The uncanny is that species of the
frightening that goes back to what was
once well known and had long been
familiar”

18. E. T. A HOFFMAN’S SANDMAN

19. THE SANDMEN YOU KNOW…
.

20. ERNST THEODOR AMADEUS HOFFMANN
• German Romantic author
of fantasy and Gothic horror.
• Birth place: Königsberg i. Pr.,
Kingdom of Prussia
• Birth date: 24 January 1776
• Death date: 25 June 1822
• Author of The
Nutcracker

21. INFP • A Mediator (INFP)
is someone who
possesses
the Introverted,
Intuitive, Feeling,
and Prospecting
personality traits.
These rare
personality types
tend to be quiet,
open-minded, and
imaginative, and
they apply a caring
and creative
approach to
everything they do.

22. “Why should not a writer be permitted to
make use of the levers of fear, terror and
horror because some feeble soul here and
there finds it more than it can bear? Shall
there be no strong meat at table because
there happen to be some guests there whose
stomachs are weak, or who have spoiled their
own digestions?”
― E.T.A. Hoffmann

23. “THE SANDMAN”
• Instead of showing dreams haunts Nathaniel
• Nathaniel’s Obsession with Sandman
• Childhood Trauma
• If children don’t go to bed the sandman “throws a
handful of sand into their eyes, so that they start
out bleeding from their heads”.
• Three letters to introduce the story.
• Tom Derose describes Hoffmann as
protomodernist (Of an earlier style approaching
what is now modern) in the way in which
Hoffmann uses this structure to destabilize his
narrative.

24. CHARACTERS
• Nathanael: The protagonist
• Lothar: The brother of Nathanael's fiancée, Clara, and
Nathanael's close friend himself.
• Coppelius/Coppola/The Sandman: Coppelius is a man
who often visited Nathanael's family, especially his father,
when Nathanael was a child.
• Professor Spalanzani: A professor at Nathanael's
university and "father" of Olimpia – more like her creator
• Olimpia: The lifelike doll
• Siegmund: Siegmund is Nathanael's friend from
university, who attempts to reason with him

25. SYMBOLS AND THEMES
• EYES
• SPYGLASS
• OLIMPIA
• LETTERS
• NEUROSIS
• UNCANNY
• CHILDHOOD TRAUMA
• REALITY vs. FANTACY

27. REALITY VS. FANTASY
• Hoffmann is skilled at
confusing reality and fantasy
• He criticizes the values of the
Enlightenment and addresses
the subjectivity of reality. ~
Olimpia’s demise
• Loss of sight
• Fight Club
• The Ending

28. THE UNCANNY, HEIMLICH -FAMILIAR BUT
CONCEALED
• An intellectual uncertainty whether an
object is alive or not.
• “It is the phantom of our own self whose
deep affinity and profound influence on our
state of mind either damns us to hell or
uplifts us into heaven.” Hoffman
• As Hoffmann has Nathaniel’s brother say:
‘We find your Olympia quite uncanny, and
prefer to have nothing to do with her. She
seems to act like a living being, and yet has
some strange peculiarity of her own.’

29. THE UNCANNY ~ OLIMPIA, SANDMAN
• Her eyes aren’t quite right
• Lifelessness in her EYES
• Functions kind of like a woman
• A figure from a fairytale, but exits in the
form of a man too, a double,
a doppelganger
• He steals eyes
• Nathaniel’s father’s death
• Eyeglass

30. CHILDHOOD TRAUMA
• Emotional Shock from Nanny
• Becoming blinded by Sandman
• Sandman matching the physical
appearance and the attitudes of his
father’s friend Coppelius.
• Castration Anxiety
• Mindless tactics can have a double-
whammy effect on children, whose
imaginations can make these stories
seem real in their minds.

31. CHILDHOOD TRAUMA
• The secretion of melatonin in the
children’s pineal gland will be impaired
and since melatonin is a multitasking
hormone, there can be complications
in the child’s development. It may
predispose the child to cancer later in
life or even at an early age.
• Impaired secretion of melatonin may
also be a reason why children are at
risk of not attaining full physical
development. Their growth might also
be stunted, so children should not be
made to work at night.

32. WOULD YOU BELIEVE ME
IF I SAID THAT I WAS SCARED
OF EVERYTHING TOO? ~ BTS
• According to Dr. Bess de Guia
• “Instilling undue fear in children can
cause damaging psychological scars in
the long-term,”
• “Such fear may be the root cause of
problems like post-traumatic stress
disorder, panic attacks and anxiety
disorder,”
• “The common psychological effect is
chronic phobic reaction, which may
extend to adolescence and beyond,”

33. NEUROSIS: ALL THESE VOICES IN
MY HEAD GET LOUD, I WISH THAT I
COULD SHUT THEM OUT ~ NF
• “He (Sandman) separates the unfortunate Nathaniel
from his betrothed and from her brother, his best
friend; he destroys the second object of his love,
Olympia, the lovely doll; and he drives him into
suicide at the moment when he has won back his
Clara” (Freud).
• Reemergence of a Sandman out of the depths of
Nathanael’s sub-consciousness.
• “With a piercing scream, “Eh! Fine eyes-a, fine eyes-
a” he (Nathanael)
leaped over the
railing” (Hoffmann, p. 21).

34. CONCLUSION
• .

35. DREW WESTEN (1998)
He is better studied as a writer, in
departments of language and
literature, than as a scientist, in
departments of psychology.
Psychologists can get along
without him, more to the point,
because there's no reason to
believe any of these things, there's
no reason to think that "Freud got it
right the first time", either.

36. PETER RUDNYTSKY
A professor of English at the University
of Florida
• “Once psychoanalysis takes hold
the culture, it becomes something
that influences later writers. There’s a
self-consciousness, starting in the
20th century, about engaging with
psychoanalysis,”

37. JOHN FLETCHER
• Professor of English at University of Warwick
• For Fletcher, “He (Freud) describes and analyses
the ways in which human subjects are caught up
in emotional dramas that repeat and repeat, and
Which they carry with them as a kind of baggage.”
• Literary people find Freud illuminating
because of this focus on scenes, micro-dramas, and
the acting out of dramas.”

38. DONNA STEWART
• A professor and chair of women’s health at
the University Health Network
• "Freud was a man of his times. He was opposed
to the women’s emancipation movement and
believed that women’s lives were dominated
by their sexual reproductive
functions."

39. “A point of view can be a dangerous
luxury when substituted for insight and
understanding.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg
Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man
“Mentally defective” was a throwback to
earlier stage in evolution“

40. “SOMETIMES IT TAKES A GOOD FALL TO
REALLY KNOW WHERE YOU STAND”
― HAYLEY WILLIAMS
•As Carl Sagan once said, “I do not want to believe,
I want to know”.
•The Qur’an calls us to reflect on a tiny fly (Qur’an
22:73).
•“I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing,
and that is that I know nothing.”
― Plato, The Republic

41. TO SUM UP
•“Psychoanalysis and analytic ideas, however
admired in their history, are not likely to be
seen as living contributors to the science of
psychology; rather, they will be regarded by
readers of these texts as ‘has-beens,’”.
•Olivia Goldhill

42. NEO-FREUDIANISM
•Neo-Freudians, generally agreed
with Freud that childhood experiences
matter, but deemphasized sex, focusing more
on the social environment and effects of
culture on personality.

43. “Even though there
are no ways of
knowing for sure,
there are ways of
knowing for pretty
sure.”
― Lemony Snicket

44. What were you dreaming to become?
Who do you see now in your mirror, I gotta
say
Go your own way
Even if you live one day
Do something
Put your weakness away
- NO MORE DREAM , BTS