Ought to Have Remained Hidden: Psychoanalytic Theory in Us (2019)
WARNING: Spoilers for Us (2019) and Psycho (1960)
In 1816, German writer Ernst Hoffmann published the short story “Der Sandmann”. The story revolves around a man named Nathanael who still lives with his childhood fear of having his eyes stolen by the titular Sandman, and in adulthood, meets a man who bears an eerie resemblance to the Sandman, thus plunging him into mania. The story was later cited in Sigmund Freud's 1919 essay "The Uncanny". In this essay, Freud elaborates on the uncanny (unheimlich in his native German), or that which is strangely familiar, a concept previously developed by philosopher F.W.J Schelling and psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch. Freud states in the essay that "According to (Schelling), everything that is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has been brought to light." 144 years later, in 1960, Alfred Hitchcock released arguably his most iconic film, Psycho, which was dubbed "the first psychoanalytic thriller" by Serge Kaganski in his 1997 book Hitchcock.