What repels by nature is too familiar: the concept of unheimlich in psychoanalytic theory and its importance in the analysis of fascism

• Grant number: 17/11435-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: September 01, 2017
• End date: August 31, 2019
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Psychology - Social Psychology
• Principal Investigator: Gustavo Henrique Dionisio
• Grantee: Rafael da Silva Shirakava
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências e Letras (FCL-ASSIS). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Assis. Assis , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This master's research project starts from the theoretical field of Freudian psychoanalysis in order to understand the problem of fascism, especially with regard to the concept of Unheimlich (which can be translated as strange, sinister, frightening, yet a stranger who is not alien, but at the same time familiar). Such category has great relevance for the study of fascism since it concerns a reaction of the subjects to what is different, that "escapes from the norm", something strange, that "repels by its nature" and what "is too familiar". Freud, in this sense, shows us how fascism has a subjective face, psychic, insofar as it formulates the impossibility of loving someone with we do not identify and about group psychology - the psychic functions of the subjects immersed in groups. Such formulations are also approached by Critical Theory, especially by the theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in their essays on social psychology, authoritarian personality studies, criticism of fascist ideology and pamphlet in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s and also on the return Germany in the 1950s. In this way, we seek to articulate the concept of Unheimlich (strange) to understand its emergence both mental and political, in an attempt to situate the problem. Thus, discuss dissolution possibilities of strangeness figure and possible interventions for the problem. (AU)

Academic Publications

(References retrieved automatically from State of São Paulo Research Institutions)

SHIRAKAVA, Rafael da Silva. Unheimliche and Fascism: a study about the Uncanny of the Freudian theory and its developments within the Frankfurt School in its analysis of the authoritarianism. 2019. Master's Dissertation - Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp). Faculdade de Ciências e Letras. Assis Assis.