From Freud's Unheimliche to Bleichmar's Primitive Unheimliche: Some Considerations on the Itinerary of a Concept

Abstract

The article investigates the conceptual itinerary of the Freudian Unheimliche up to its key reformulation by Silvia Bleichmar as a "primitive Unheimliche." It begins by noting that the plurality of translations of the German term—from the English the uncanny to the French l’inquiétante étrangeté, including Spanish (lo siniestro, lo ominoso) and Portuguese (o estranho, o inquietante, o infamiliar) renditions—attests to the conceptual density and hermeneutic persistence of Freud's 1919 text. From this starting point, the paper reconstructs the Freudian formulation of the concept, articulating it with the dialectic between heimlich and unheimlich, the phenomenon of the double (Doppelgänger) in the reading of E. T. A. Hoffmann's tale, and the metapsychological operation of repression (Verdrängung), according to which the effect of strangeness results from the return of something once familiar and repressed. Subsequently, the article analyzes Silvia Bleichmar's concise yet theoretically dense deployment of the term in her 2005 seminars, where the concept is shifted from the realm of experiences related to the return of the repressed to the constitutive stages of subjectivity, linking itself to disgust and shame/modesty as precursors of repression and as the earliest moral dams. It concludes that the notion of a primitive Unheimliche, while preserving the Freudian mechanics of transforming the pleasurable into the strange, shifts its relational axis from the other to the subject’s relationship with oneself, fulfilling an auxiliary role in the constitution of subjectivity and incipient morality.