Paranormal Psychoanalysis
If gothic literature is that genre concerned with cursed architecture (the church turned upside down), then psychoanalysis—from one view—remains well within the confines of the genre even while reducing it down to its most constituent part: the haunted castle becomes the human body itself. Freud is often grim reading with his suspicion of the cure and his frank assessment of the painful vicissitudes of life: we live to die; the treatment of the clinic allows only a return from painful neurosis to mere “ordinary unhappiness;” thanks for that, herr doktor. Likewise his chilling essay on The Uncanny (Das Unheimliche) is a how-to primer on the horror genre: the uncanny is that moment of shock and terror when what had been most familiar becomes terribly alien; Freud notes elsewhere that certain neurotics describe their unaccountable behavior as “demonic.” That the basic template of most horror movies is the violent encounter of a familiar and yet impersonal force—often embodied in or through cursed architecture—reveals horror movies as being essentially psychoanalytic. In this bleak view, that which determines human behavior, the ghost haunting our mortal coil (or that is the mortal coil) is the it. The it is that impersonal thing that lives us, both from within and from without. “We are ‘lived’ by unknown and uncontrollable forces” (The Ego and the Id). The lack of control regarding this thing that we inhabit and that in turn inhabits us is, to put it mildly, rather disturbing; it is the horror in the horror movie. But while the uncontrollable nature of our life can be terrifying—is there no one at the wheel?—the unknown quality of this thing is less so. Paranormal psychoanalysis with its indifference to the positivism of science, reason, logic and philosophy, makes a position from unknowing.
