Echoes of romanticism and fantastic literature in psychoanalysis

Abstract

This paper maps the historical, aesthetic, and epistemic processes of the 18th and 19th centuries that associate romanticism, fantastic literature and psychoanalysis. We argue that fantastic is an important vector through which elements of Romanticism were incorporated into the psychoanalytic model of the psyche. Assuming that such Romantic influences were assimilated selectively and creatively, we highlight some points of contention and compromise between romanticism and the Enlightenment that were later resumed and transformed by fantastic literature and psychoanalysis: the themes of love, madness, sexuality, superstitions and myths; the relationship between reality and its representations and between thought and consciousness; and the rhetorical use of irony. Finally, the text points to the psychoanalytic approach of the uncanny (Unheimliche) as the most sensitive moment of such exchange.