A pungent glimpse: the sad infallibility of guilt

Abstract

O crime do professor de matemática, by Clarice Lispector, addresses the unconscious need for punishment arising from the feeling of guilt, which is an inexorable element of the human psyche. The man's mirroring in his pet leads him to an approximation of a possible awareness of this disorder, which culminates in the unavoidable abandonment of the dog. Based on Sigmund Freud's essays Das Unheimliche and Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, we aim at understanding the origin of the doleful identification between these two characters in the narrated story, as well as the corollary of the culture that is responsible for the human sadness which the teacher is inevitably part of.