Responses to ‘Anxiety in the Eyes’

The word 'Augenangst', which James Strachey has rendered inconsistently into English as 'fears about the eye', 'anxiety about the eyes', and 'anxiety about eyes', is not exactly a hapax legomenon in Freud's oeuvre, yet it is fair to say that it is an occasionalism, because it only appears in the 1919 essay 'The "Uncanny"' and more specifically in the context of Freud's analysis of E. T. A. Hoffmann's short story 'Der Sandmann", which was originally written in 1815 (Freud, 1919, pp.227-33;Hoffmann, 1982Hoffmann, [1815]]).It is to Fdida's credit that he has extracted this term from Freud's work and given the first impetus to its theoretical and clinical elaboration, considering the highly charged, ambiguous symbolic status of the eye in Western cultural historyfrom the protective eye of Horus in Ancient Egypt to the diabolical curse of the evil eye (jettatura) in Mediterranean folklore-and the fact that the psychoanalytic literature on the subject is almost non-existent.As an exceptionally well-read and indefatigably creative scholar, Fdida also effortlessly forges links between art historical perspectives on the optical manifestations of the unconscious, high-brow psychoanalytic conceptualisations of the human body, and his own clinical experience as a practicing psychoanalyst.Drawing on the latter, Fdida deservedly pays attention

Anxiety · Psychiatry · Psychoanalysis · Psychotherapist · Psychiatric care and mental health services · Psychology

• The Sideshow, or

  Samuel Weber•Modern Language Notes•1973

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• Thalassa

  Sandor Ferenczi•The Psychoanalytic Quarterly•1934

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