Uncanny Dolls: Images of Death in Rilke and Freud

Abstract

children's lives, has found little attention from the academic community. In the history of psychoanalysis, as in the history of traditional psychology, the doll has not been found worthy of examina tion. Freud dismissed the doll in his discussion of the uncanny because she did not symbolize Oedipal issues very well.2 Psychoanalysts since then who have worked with children discuss dolls in the context of play therapy, where they, like other toys, allow the child to project uncon scious processes and facilitate the resolution of conflicts which the child is unable to articulate.3 Once in a while, we find a case history where a female child uses a doll in an aggressive manner (CS 226-27), which is interpreted as a substitute for the absent penis, or where a little boy is brought to the therapist because he plays with dolls,4 which is inter preted as his pathological identification with the mother. Yet here, too, the phenomenon of the doll is not explored but taken for granted as a symbol within the oedipal struggle of the preschooler. D. W. Winnicott groups the doll together with teddy bears, blankets, and other soft toys as transitional objects which make the gradual separation from the mother possible.5 The attachment to the consistent, transitional object allows the child to shift the cathexis away from the mother and so gains the child a certain amount of independence and New Literary History, 1996, 27: 663-677