Reflections on the Aesthetic Experience: Psychoanalysis and the Uncanny by Gregorio Kohon

Abstract

Reviewed by: Reflections on the Aesthetic Experience: Psychoanalysis and the Uncanny by Gregorio Kohon Gabriel Reisner Reflections on the Aesthetic Experience: Psychoanalysis and the Uncanny. Gregorio Kohon. London and New York: Routledge, 2016. 176 pp. Cannying the Uncanny: Critical and Psychoanalytic Views of Freud's Concept Gregorio Kohon's volume on the uncanny and aesthetic experience expands our understanding of both the unknown and the unknowable in artistic representations. We finish Kohon's book convinced that the uncanny is more than a detachable dimension hidden in the depths or looming over the outer reaches of art. Rather, the uncanny is intrinsic to our aesthetic experience and it reverberates within other discoveries. His uncanny connects to disruption and disorientation in artistic encounters—confronting the uncanny in creative work throws us off balance, while rebalancing requires a subtle reorienting. We find our feet on unfamiliar ground and return to a no-longer-comforting earth. Kohon begins with a classic comprehension of the uncanny, Freud's adoption of Schelling's "that [which] ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light" (Freud, 1919, p. 225). But this fundamental definition undergoes variations and transformations as the author's Reflections continues. Early in the first chapter Kohon brings forward Richard Eyre's London 1980 production of Hamlet. He introduces an internalized Ghost of the Father; the Ghost's voice emanating from within the Prince of Denmark expresses an alien figure within the self of the protagonist. Relating this to the Jewish legend of the Dybbuk, Kohon invokes motifs like the usurpation by a demon and the being possessed by supernatural forces. He notes that the actor, Martyn Price, had recently lost his father, blurring the line between reality and fantasy in uncanny uncertainty. Kohon makes connections here, and elsewhere in his informative study, of an allusive and theoretical kind, while overlooking specific textual and psychoanalytical dimensions in the works he presents. For example, in this version of Hamlet, with its internal dialogue between father and son, the voice of the vengeful father suggests a draconian superego, a dominating presence demanding not only loyalty but a total submission of being from Hamlet. The Prince who is the subject, the ego, [End Page 470] the "I" of the play, remains unrecognized by a Father-Ghost that is all about Itself, Its will, Its grievance, Its vengeance. The Father that denies the subjectivity of the Son is no less Father-centric, no less self-annihilating, when we are talking about the Father-in-the-Son. Omitting any grappling with this point, or with the psychic dimensions of such an internalized presentation, Kohon references a general-critical rather than a specific-psychoanalytic uncanny. A similar omission characterizes an interesting discussion of the role of the uncanny in Freud's article "A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis" (1936). Not wishing to be reductive and remain limited by Freud's understanding of Schelling's "secrets" as relating to fear, trauma or, specifically, castration, Kohon explores the subject further. Influenced by the work of Michel de M'Uzan we learn that the strange states of mind Freud experienced amid the ruins of the Parthenon, after looking forward to seeing them for so many years, were strangely elusive and uncapturable. Freud had experienced "the feeling of derealization" (p. 244) where, looking over the expanses of iconic Grecian destruction, the ruined vistas did not feel real (they were Fremd, the German word meaning, "strange" or "belonging to another"). As a kind of corollary or perhaps inversion of the derealized state we have the experiencing self not feeling real in a "depersonalization." (Both the surroundings and the self became strange and other.) These two states of mind lead Kohon to a series of interesting connections. Kohon leads us through M'Uzan's referencing of the "stranger anxiety" babies feel toward the end of their first year, giving the uncanny "its primordial basis" (as cited in Kohon, 2016, p. 12). Linking that idea to Lacan's "mirror stage," the spectral stranger with its uncertain relation to the observing self, he further attaches Kristeva's claim that "I" and "me" are foreign or alien concepts for the experiencing subject. And he brings in...