This article comments on the links established between fantastic literature, psychoanalysis and romanticism, understanding the latter as a strategic link between the first two. We start from the premise that, based on the tradition established by romanticism, it is possible to discuss in greater depth some themes that were later developed in the scope of fantastic literature and psychoanalysis.

It is worth remembering that the origin of fantastic literature traces back to the early 19th century (Batalha, 2012; Ceserani, 1999; Todorov, 2012), the same period of the height of romanticism in Europe (Palma, Chiarini, & Teixeira, 2013). The peak of fantastic literature, in turn, happened late in the same century (Calvino, 2004; Ceserani, 1999), coinciding with the prehistory of psychoanalysis (Gay, 1989). It is then suggested, as a hypothesis to be investigated, that fantastic literature constituted an important vector through which elements of the romantic tradition were incorporated into the psychoanalytical model of the psychic apparatus.

It should be clarified that in both cases the assimilation of romantic influence took place selectively and creatively. Fantastic literature and psychoanalysis not only incorporated specific and occasional features of romanticism but also added significant transformations to them (Carvalho, 1989; Ceserani, 1999), so that it is not a question, here, of settling the originality of one or the other, but to assess the complex web of influences that link them to romanticism. Hence the emphasis given to the cultural, historical, geographic and linguistic environment that favored such mediations.

Romanticism is understood as the cultural, ideological and aesthetic movement that emerged in the late 18th century, initially in Europe, later extending to other countries (Palma et al., 2013). Although its apogee took place in the early 19th century, its influence is still noticeable today not only in art and literature, but also in science and customs (Löwy & Sayre, 1995).

Romanticism emerged as a counterpoint to Enlightenment, rationalism and classicism. Its criticism, however, does not deny the project of modernity in its entirety, since the romantics assimilated some of its traits and premises, which contributed to the formation of a conception of subjectivity that has become widely disseminated in contemporaneity (Löwy & Sayre, 1995). The main mark of romanticism is, therefore, in the valorization of the singular, the radical and the exception (Löwy & Sayre, 1995) or, as Loureiro (2020a) suggests, of the style.

Fantastic, in turn, is defined as a way of making literature that engenders a gloomy ambience, which leads the reader, in a labyrinthine and sneaky way, to confront an apparently supernatural and extraordinary fact (Calvino, 2006; Casares, 2013). This expedient, however, is strongly based on a rational and logical narrative that mimics everyday life to, in its outcome, produce a break with the expectation of linearity that the text itself cherishes (Roas, 2014). Such an arrangement aims to trigger a hesitation in the reader’s confidence about the consistency of his grasp of the world and the feeling of familiarity in relation to the things that surround him. The subjective division established by this textual architecture is, for many theorists, the distinctive feature of fantastic literature (Roas, 2014; Todorov, 2012).

Psychoanalysis can be described as: (1) a procedure for investigating psychic processes supported by the hypothesis of the unconscious; (2) a modality of treatment for neurotic disorders; and (3) a discipline established by gathering information from these first two lines of work (Freud, 1922/1999). It arose from the dignification of practices and themes considered marginal by late nineteenth-century medicine, which cultivated the ideal of relying exclusively on chemical and physicalist procedures (Freud, 1924/1999, 1925/1999). In this context, psychic treatment (Freud, 1890/1997), which was based on speech, was seen by medical orthodoxy as an intervention method without a scientific basis, linked to the practice of impostors and superstitious people.

Freud (1890/1997, 1904/1997) then proposed the recognition of the materiality of the word as a scientifically oriented instrument of investigation and therapeutic intervention. Hence his interest in hypnosis, the suggestion and the link between doctor and patient as resources for the treatment of some forms of psychic suffering that were beyond the reach of the influence of traditional medicine. The Interpretation of Dreams, at the turn of the 20th century, was the landmark in the emergence of psychoanalysis, when hypnosis was abandoned and free association was adopted (Freud, 1922/1999).

From the above, we emphasize that the purpose of this work is to draw a map of the points of convergence and discrepancies that exist between romanticism, fantastic literature and psychoanalysis, in order to clarify the appropriation of the heritage of the first two by the latter. This is a theoretical, qualitative, bibliographical, interdisciplinary investigation, in an essay format.

The adjective romantic arose in reference to stories of chivalry, a genre widely spread during the Middle Ages. In the 17th century, in England, this term acquired a pejorative connotation, starting to indicate an excessively imaginative or emotional attitude (Löwy & Sayre, 1995; Palma et al., 2013). Later, the word romanticism, as a noun, came to designate the cultural and artistic movement that emerged in a similar, independent and synchronous way (Löwy & Sayre, 1995, p. 80) in Germany, England and France at the end of the 18th century and which extended over the first decades of the following century to other regions.

It should be noted that such chronology raises divergences. Many authors trace the beginnings of romanticism to an earlier period; others propose the term pre-Romantic to refer to transitional works that were precursors of this movement (Löwy & Sayre, 1995). There are still those who defend the extension of romanticism - or traces of it - beyond the first half of the 19th century (Mann, 1929/1991).

It was emphasized in the introduction that the main hallmark of romanticism is the intention to establish a counterpoint to the Enlightenment. In this sense, it should not be taken as an obscurantist, retrograde or conservative movement, given that its criticism selectively focuses on some features of modernity, aiming to achieve an expanded conception of reason. In the words of T. Mann (1875-1955) (1929/1991), referring to the philosopher F. W. Nietzsche (1844-1900), romanticism was simultaneously a movement of reaction and advancement in relation to enlightenment and rationalism, in the sense of maintaining its foundations and correcting its imperfections.

Romantic authors rescued elements of popular oral tradition, incorporating traces of musicality and colloquiality to writing (Carpeaux, 2014; Loureiro, 2002a). Hence the interest in medieval European sagas, which came to occupy the place that Greek myths had in classicism.

Another important feature of romanticism is the concern to overcome the boundaries between literary genres and artistic production forms, which contributed to a more fluid dialogue between visual arts, music and literature, in addition to a more accentuated confluence between prose and poetry.

The Romantics were opposed to the Renaissance aesthetic, which aspired to an ideal of Greco-Roman beauty, based on good shape and proportionality of measures. From the critique of the classical beauty model and the Enlightenment reason came the interest in the unpredictable and the immeasurable, embodied above all in the contemplation of nature, which triggered an important change in the way of conceiving aesthetics: the beautiful, which occupied its place as a goal of artistic production, gives way to the sublime. While the former seeks to appease the spirit through a harmonious relationship with the work, the latter seeks to unsettle, providing an opening to the transcendent and the ineffable (Cattapan, 2019; Trias, 2005).

On this point, the analogy between subjective impulses and the forces of nature is considered paradigmatic, as supported by the Sturm und Drang movement - in English, storm and impetus - which occurred in Germany at the end of the 18th century, of which F. Schiller (1759-1805) and J. W. Goethe (1749-1832) took part. For Duarte (2004) and Loureiro (2002a), this movement had a strong impact on Freud’s work.

Despite these guidelines, romanticism did not have a cohesive and rigid project, which explains its wide range of geographical and linguistic inflections. An interesting example of this is ultra-romanticism, which influenced Portuguese and Brazilian fantastic literature in the second half of the 19th century (Matangrano & Tavares, 2018).

Having made these more general considerations about romanticism, some of the main features of modernity contested by the romantics are listed below.

Initially, it is important to highlight the concern with science’s disenchantment with life. Until the Middle Ages, the world was, for the common man, inhabited by supernatural forces, which constantly interfered in daily life and determined the course of his destiny. It is known that the passage from religious and magical thinking to rational and concrete thinking took place slowly, gradually and incompletely, with this process permeated by conflicts, compromises and setbacks.

An example of this is the transition from an Aristotelian, closed and finite world model, which guided thought in the Middle Ages, to that of an open and infinite universe (Koyré, 2006). This fact, however, did not completely eradicate pre-Enlightenment conceptions, which migrated to another level of knowledge - the informal, unsystematic, linked to common sense - and thus continued to influence people’s judgment (Ceserani, 1999). Romanticism sought to rehabilitate some forms of knowledge despised by rationalists from an aesthetic and philosophical perspective. A few decades later, psychoanalysis followed the same path from the perspective of the clinic (Loureiro, 2002a).

Among the romantics, the interest in myths stood out, considered by them as a link between religion, history, poetry and language: a reservoir of symbols and allegories, a new way, this time of a secular character, of access to the sacred (Löwy & Sayre, 1995).

Another point criticized by the romantics is the increasingly quantitative and mechanical approach to the phenomena of nature. Since the Industrial Revolution, nature has come to be seen as a raw material to be explored and priced, as well as workers’ time, energy and labor (Löwy & Sayre, 1995). Romanticism responded to this situation by praising the dynamics of the organic, which contrasted with the mechanic description of the human body adopted by modern sciences: physics, physiology and anatomy.

The forces of nature then came to be valued due to their mysterious, unfathomable and uncontrollable character (Loureiro, 2002a). An important development of this project is the defense of the unity of being in the face of the imminent threat of its fragmentation, which explains the preference for a monistic and holistic explanation of the world and the refusal of an absolute external objectivity (Duarte, 2004).

In this context, the drive (Trieb), as a natural impulse to creation, became the driving force of artistic production (Duarte, 2004). The work of art started to be contemplated for what it presents as singular and irreducible. Its reference standard is no longer mimesis - the imitation of reality - and good shape. Originality, intensity and unity became an inseparable triad of the romantic artistic project. Hence the importance given to the issue of style (Loureiro, 2002a).

The Romantics were not opposed to a logical, methodical and concrete approach to the world, but questioned an essentialist and univocal idea of reason (Loureiro, 2002a). In the arts, the effort to expand the limits of reason materialized in the exercise and defense of creative freedom. In literature, this tendency can be seen in the increasingly frequent assumption of the inner monologue and the perspective of a non-omniscient narrator (Löwy & Sayre, 1995), which is fundamental for the conformation of fantastic literature (Ceserani, 1999).

In this context, love and madness were consolidated as privileged themes, as both show a unique and differentiated way of articulation between representation, affection and thought. Love, in particular, started to be intensely valued, being elevated to the condition of an individual, internal and absolute truth. Hence, an ideal of life was created - the search for happiness through sexual and spiritual fusion with another being - which, despite being widely criticized, still plays a significant social, cultural and artistic influence today.

Madness, in turn, came to be valued as an answer to the mystery of artistic creativity (Löwy & Sayre, 1995). It is worth remembering that, in the Classical Age, madness is gradually deprived of the place of truth and sacredness to which it was identified. When transposed to the category of mental illness, it becomes an object of care in modern medicine and, later, in psychiatry (Foucault, 1978, 1999). The madman is then seen as someone devoid of reason, incapable of making his own decisions.

Against this process of disempowering madness, romantics sought to treat the madman as a person who has his own rationality and who, in his own way, is capable of expressing an inventive geniality.

In the wake of renewed interest in the Gothic style, the romantics began to extol the night and the shadows. It is important to remember that the Medieval Era was designated by the illuminists as the Dark Ages, with light being the absolute symbol of reason (Loureiro, 2002a; Löwy & Sayre, 1995). Therefore, the use of the night figure refers to the intention of rescuing what had been abandoned by the Enlightenment project. This motto inspired a trend of romanticism, especially in its later strand, which adopted a more pessimistic attitude towards the civilizing project of instrumental reason embraced by the Industrial Revolution.

This fact was of unparalleled importance for the development of the fantastic literary project and the psychoanalytic clinic. Henceforth, the dream gains space as an expression of a creative and autonomous mental activity, which confronts a conception of rational thought identified with consciousness. The use of irony as a rhetorical strategy also stands out (Duarte, 2004; Loureiro, 2002a).

The adopted perspective is that romantic irony constituted an attitude towards reason which, however, does not do without it: it uses a discourse based on rationality, centered on a supposedly translucent and reflective thought, to unravel it from its interior, with its own weapons and thus foster a broader form of rationality (Kierkegaard 1976).

To conclude this topic, attention is drawn to the romantic critique of the modern state model. As a response to the period of social upheaval driven by the French Revolution, the demand for a new political project became a relevant point among the Romantics (Rodrigues, 2007), who endeavored to produce new forms of community bond (Löwy & Sayre, 1995). This goal, in turn, could only be achieved through a broader training process (Bildung), which would make the individual fit for fruition, artistic creation and engagement in ethically fairer social relations. The urgency to produce more genuine exchange relationships encouraged the interest in archaic forms of sociability. With this, the romantic social and political project took on a nostalgic and utopian trait.

Let us then see how the issues that were pointed out during this topic appear in fantastic literature and in psychoanalysis.

As stated in the introduction, the last moments of romanticism, in its darkest phase, coincide with the emergence of fantastic literature. According to Rancière (2009), during the 19th century there was a radical change in the aesthetic regime, characterized by a transformation in the way of conceiving the relationship between image and representation, which culminated in a tendency towards fragmentation of narrative strategies, of the construction process of characters and the very temporality of the plot.

For Ceserani (1999), the main feature of the literature that developed in this period - notably the fantastic one - is the intention to explain and problematize the narrative procedures and mechanisms of fiction in a sort of metanarrative. This tendency can be seen in the emphasis on adopting a first-person perspective, in the search for the reader’s affective implication, in the construction of image games and in the wide use of gaps and overdeterminations of meaning. The author also highlights some experiments that emerged within the fantastic literature: the subjective representation of time, the valuation of the characters’ inconsistencies and hesitations and the emphasis given to dreams, fantasies and visions.

In this context, it can be said that the texts of E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) constitute a strategic link between romanticism, fantastic literature and psychoanalysis. However, other authors who preceded him but did not produce the same impact should be noted: W. Walpole (1717-1797), J. Cazotte (1719-1792) and J. Potocki (1761-1815) (Battle, 2003). All of them, to a greater or lesser extent, share the influence of the Gothic style, from which we highlight, in addition to the predilection for excesses and contrasts, the care in creating an obscure ambience, which simulated, more or less stereotypically, the feeling of being in a medieval architecture building (Ceserani, 1999).

Such literature was, however, short-lived. It did not take long for, even in the 18th century, the interest in castles, churches and cathedrals to be supplanted by other ways of creating an atmosphere of fear and tension. At first, the demonic, ghostly, and vampire figures lent themselves to this function. Gradually, these themes, without disappearing completely, gave way to more common and concrete strategies of alluding to the supernatural. For Calvino (2004), the visionary fantastic of the early 19th century was gradually replaced by the everyday fantastic, which predominated at the end of that century.

In this path - from the Gothic to the fantastic - there is a shift: from an architecture in a figurative sense, which explores the details of the structure of medieval buildings as a metaphor for the human soul, to an architecture in an extended sense, understood here as the realization of a specific psychic situation, delimited by the modulation of the affect of anguish and by the evocation of the feeling of the uncanny (Unheimliche) (Freud, 1919/2019).

Ceserani (1999) also places as a recurrent theme in the fantastic literature the questioning of the ideal of romantic love: on the one hand, the praise of love as the perfect and absolute union between bodies and souls; on the other, the recognition of the impossibility of achieving such unity. Hence there is an attitude of idealization of love, which becomes intensely desired, but only indirectly, in its sublimated form. As a result, there is a strong emphasis on erotic components, while their expression is restricted to their aesthetic substitutes. Thereby the interest in the more deviant and darker aspects of sexuality was strengthened (Rodrigues, 2007), which nevertheless continued to occupy a hidden and marginalized position. Such components are, in turn, extensively explored by the fantastic literature (Ceserani, 1999), which was concerned with highlighting the darkest face of love, especially in its relationship with death. Hence, it can be said that fantastic literature, as well as the work of the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), is the result of this sociocultural situation (Rodrigues, 2007), which later also influenced psychoanalysis.

Siebers (1984) emphasizes another aspect of the romantic heritage assimilated by the fantastic: the attraction to the supernatural and superstitions. Differently from the Enlightenment philosophy, which disqualified these themes, reducing them to the condition of residue of a pre-rationalist worldview; romanticism adopted an attitude of aestheticizing popular myths and beliefs. This approach is radicalized within the scope of fantastic literature, whose texts never tire of asking the limits of truth and the possibility of accessing reality. For this, the romantic fantastic authors took into account not only erudite and formal sources, but also common sense and popular knowledge. From the tension between these fields, a twilight zone was created where the natural and the supernatural become knotted and confused.

This interest, in turn, was reflected in the narrative procedure itself. For Siebers (1984), the problem of superstition is not resolved by an intentional choice between a rational and materialist approach, on the one hand, and the other, transcendental and supernatural. According to him, there is a strategy in the way of telling fantastic stories that subtly interweaves the reader’s deepest beliefs with those of the character/narrator, building a contrast with a skeptical and factual attitude that predominates in the narrative. Thus, an appeal is made to the reader’s confidence and critical judgment, while the text insinuates a series of contradictory and excluding interpretations. From there, a set of convolutions is woven, from which the supernatural insinuates itself as an astonishingly plausible reality. The reader is then attracted by something that he rationally judges not to exist and which he refutes, but whose reality he intimately cherishes.

Despite pointing to this complex dialectic, Siebers places a socio-anthropological analysis at the center of his assessment of the romantic fantastic. For him, superstitions always bring into play reciprocal relations of exclusion and inclusion, of stigmatization and identification, of legitimization and disempowerment of discourses and social actors. Even without agreeing with the breadth of Siebers’s conclusion, it is reasonable to partially endorse his reasoning, recognizing as a strong mark of fantastic literature the production of a tense coalescence between psychic and social reality. In other words, in fantastic literature, fantastic is a way of conjuring and questioning political and social reality.

Siebers (1984) also emphasizes the use of irony as another prominent feature of the romantic heritage in fantastic literature. Here, however, irony takes on a specific form: the identification with the figure of the excluded ones, the insane, the marginal and the criminal. According to the author, the tendency to disqualify the character-narrator and, occasionally, the writer himself predominates in the romantic fantastic, which can lead to risks to his health.

It is believed that this hypothesis, with some variation, is already present in the text of psychoanalyst O. Rank (1884-1939) on the double. Without referring directly to fantastic literature or romanticism, but citing several writers identified with these two movements, such as Hoffmann, Poe and Maupassant, Rank (1914) verifies a causal relationship between the writers’ pathological traits and the literary exploration of the double theme. For Siebers (1984), there would be an analogous correspondence between the narrator’s ironic self-depreciation strategy and a tendency of the writer’s psychic weakening.

Even without adhering to the arguments of Siebers and Rank, it is considered interesting to explore them from the perspective of the appropriation of the melancholy theme by fantastic literature. In other words, ironic self-depreciation is taken here as an aesthetic strategy, and not necessarily as the expression of social nihilism or a morbid tendency.

Starting from the commentary on the texts of T. Gautier (1811-1872) and E. T. A. Hoffmann, authors recognized for their connection to the fantastic, Cantagrel (2004) discusses the relationship between romanticism and melancholy. Redefined by medical psychopathology in the late 18th century as a form of attenuated insanity, the etiology of melancholy is explained by the effects of passions and imagination on the brain. Due to these new provocative agents and causal relationships, there was then an approximation between mental pathologies and normality states, which began to combine, constituting a kind of continuum. At that time, the diagnostic opposition between melancholy and mania gained strength: while in the latter the erratic and intensified course of thoughts and the difficulty in consolidating ideational connections stand out, in the former, delusional fixed ideas and low mood are predominant.

According to Cantagrel (2004), Hoffmann used this medical definition to question the human condition itself and the artist’s creative nature. The author then lists some themes that stand out in Hoffmann’s work: the ambivalence of marginality, the confusion between exterior and interior, the link between disease and truth, the cyclical alternations between impotence and creation, and the incongruity between love and reality.

All these elements are present in Hoffmann’s most famous short story (1817/2015), “The Sandman”, which aroused the interest of Rank (1914) and, later, of Freud (1919/2019). In this story, the protagonist inadvertently falls in love with a doll, which he believes to be human. The text is organized in letters, which are exchanged between Nathanael, the main character, and two other interlocutors: his fiancée and her brother. As the narrative progresses, Nathanael’s health and understanding deteriorate, while his rhetoric remains lucid and precise, at least until its conclusion. Even the improbable falling in love and the bizarre figure of the sandman and his avatars are described in a very believable and everyday way, which contributes to capturing the reader in the plot. The reader’s experience of anguish is built little by little, by the accumulation of a sequence of apparently commonplace and banal details.

It is understood, therefore, that Hoffmann’s work and the Unheimliche concept condense this network of influences that, from romanticism, permeate fantastic literature all the way to psychoanalysis. It is now worth pointing out how this influence is materialized in Freudian metapsychology.

The main component of the romantic heritage that crosses both fantastic literature and psychoanalysis is the interest in the so-called deviations, distortions and perversions of sexuality (Ceserani, 1999). If, in romanticism, such elements were intensely mobilized, their expression was conditioned to the realization of an ideal of love in an aesthetic way. The trace of excess and disproportionality that romantic artistic expressions assume shows that a peculiar relationship with an object with its own characteristics - which cannot be qualified as harmonic - is called into question.

In fantastic literature, those elements of sexuality that are at the heart of, but do not support the ideal of romantic love, gain evidence. However, in this context, its recognition serves a very specific function: mobilizing desire, modulating anxiety and producing the reader’s surprise. An example of this is the love bond, as improbable as it is impetuous, that unites Nathanael with the doll Olympia (Hoffmann, 1817/2015). Hoffmann’s text is not an isolated case. The following texts that explore the connection between sex and anguish are indicated: “The dead in love” by T. Gautier (1836/1999), “Ligeia” by E. A. Poe (1838/2006) and “The dead girl” by G. de Maupassant (1887/2015).

Psychoanalysis, in turn, is born from the realization that these deviant components of sexuality are an important and significant part of the human psychic constitution. By relating these elements to the etiology of neurosis, Freud (1905/1997b) established the foundations for the psychoanalytic treatment of nervous diseases. For this, he finds that it is necessary to work with anguish, taking it as a strategic factor associated with psychic resistance, which appears modified at each stage of treatment. Therefore, it is not part of the psychoanalytic proposal to deliberately produce situations of anguish, but to welcome and modulate them so that the conditions for carrying out the analytical treatment are produced.

The apparently irrational, preposterous and childish character of the anguish aroused by the fantastic narratives is, so to speak, the other face of the coin of the theory of psychosexual development (Freud, 1905/1997b). What is at stake in this proposition is the idea that neither love nor sexuality are immanent, congenital, unitary and homogeneous categories. The correspondence between the perverse practices of adults and the idiosyncrasies of childhood supports the thesis that sexuality is a construction, the product of a plastic process, crossed by contingencies and conditionants, which is subject to multiple outcomes and which leaves marks, points of fixation, in adult life.

Hoffmann’s narrative expedient (1817/2015), which traces the crisis that erupts in Nathanael’s early adult life to his childhood experiences, when analyzed from the current perspective, seems to corroborate the psychoanalytic thesis about the sexual etiology of neuroses. This fact makes plausible the hypothesis that fantastic literature constituted an important precedent for the emergence of psychoanalysis.

It is highlighted how problematic for Freud (1905/1997b) is the establishment of a point of arrival that serves as a criterion for evaluating a supposedly healthy and normal sexuality. For psychoanalysis, the phallus embodies the indeterminacy and the impossibility of previously delimiting the destinies of sexuality. It is correlated with the premise that there is no connaturality in the choice of sexual partners, regardless of their biological sexes. The phallus plays a beacon function, enabling a position to be taken in the face of sexual difference and castration, which is evidenced, above all, in the impossibility of achieving a complementary and reciprocity bond with the partner.

Indeed, the conception of sexuality and love supported by psychoanalysis is at odds with the romantic ideal (Loureiro 2000, 2002a) and closer to the fantastic approach to this theme.

Another important point in the appropriation of the romantic tradition by psychoanalysis is the critique of classical Enlightenment reason, which, in its origins, overlaps consciousness, thought and reason. Romanticism, especially in its darker aspect, drew attention to madness and altered states of consciousness - hypnosis, suggestion and dreaming - as strategic themes to attempt an essentialist and abstract conception of reason.

Moving in this direction, it is worth dwelling a little more on the project embraced by the romantics, but mainly by fantastic literature, which we can call narcissistic disassembly. Such endeavor can be seen, especially, in the abundant use of irony (Siebers, 1894) and in the reference to melancholy (Cantagrel, 2004).

It is understood that irony exploits the overdetermination and polyphony of utterances in order to stress the claim to integrity, homogeneity and haughtiness cultivated by the Self (Loureiro, 2002a, 2002b). The ironic saying presupposes a different voice that is subjectivated - which means: assumed as a legitimate psychic production -, which raises contradictions and questions narcissistic ideals, corroborating the recognition of contents, whose expression is limited by psychic resistance.

It is then possible to establish a correlation between the fantastic literary tradition and the formulation of the aesthetic of the uncanny. The Unheimliche, for psychoanalysis, is at the same time the most intimate and the most external to the subject. It is the mark of a founding otherness in its most archaic and primitive sense. For Freud (1919/2019), the uncanny is the feeling resulting from the apperception of a constitutive and constituting psychic content hitherto unrecognized. Such content, which was in a latent state, suddenly becomes manifest. In this way, the Unheimliche can be considered a response that goes back to a moment when the Self begins to recognize itself as an image and the field of the other begins to define itself. Only from this point is it possible to speak of similarity and difference. Before that, one is hostage to univocity and language has the value of what is perceived.

The uncanny refers to an experience that dialectizes, albeit fleetingly, the boundaries of the Self and the feeling of familiarity in relation to everyday life. Such feeling is accompanied by a moderate anguish, whose modulation is widely explored in the fantastic texts that served as material for the reformulation of the Freudian theory on this theme.

An intimate relationship between the essay on the uncanny (Freud, 1919/2019) and the texts on the second topic is thus verified. Therefore, the Unheimliche should not be considered an isolated and fortuitous construction in Freud’s work. The fine connection of this concept with fantastic literature and romanticism can be seen from the numerous references present in Freud’s and Rank’s essays on the uncanny and the double (Rabêlo, Martins, & Sträter, 2019) to writers whose works are in the field of that literary territory and that cultural movement. It is argued that the reading of these literary works constituted an important resource in the path of Freud and his collaborators, alongside the clinic, for the construction of a theory of the Self and its failures - that is, psychosis, melancholy and mourning (Freud, 1933/1997).

From this argument, Siebers’s assertion (1984) is questioned, of which we recognize antecedents in Rank’s text (1914), that the ironic romantic rhetoric would be related to the weakening of the writer’s psychic situation. In principle, it can be objected that narrator, character, writer and author are distinct functions, which become knotted but not confused (Willemart, 2014). However, more important for the purpose of this work is to point out that, for psychoanalysis, the category of Self is not confused with the totality of the psychic apparatus, nor does it represent its center of gravity. Therefore, the process of narcissistic derision promoted by romantic irony does not necessarily imply a psychic weakening, be it of the reader or the writer.

The psychoanalytic clinic demonstrates that if, on the one hand, the maintenance of some level of investment and narcissistic cohesion is important to achieve psychic balance, its inflation, on the other hand, is not synonymous with health, since it leads to the narrowing of communication channels between psychic instances and the exacerbation of conflicts. Therefore, it is convenient for the Self to be porous and permeable to products arising from the It (Freud, 1933/1997).

Another point of interest in the relationship between romanticism, fantastic literature and psychoanalysis is the appreciation of overdetermination and gaps in meaning (Todorov, 2012). It is argued that both fantastic literature and psychoanalysis can be framed between the discursive modalities that Figueiredo (1991) describes as post-romantic, in which the indication of an insufficiency of representations and a mismatch between words and things stands out.

It is also relevant to highlight the dialectization of the relationship between belief and non-belief as a theme that gains relevance and complexity in the transition from romanticism to fantastic literature, and from this to psychoanalysis, when the problematization of the nature of doubt takes on a new connotation. In romanticism (Mezan, 2013), doubt drives the exploration of phenomena situated on the fringes of reason. In fantastic literature, it serves the artificial realization of a zone of indeterminacy and undecidability, conducive to the emergence of the feeling of the strange (Todorov, 2012) and the uncanny. Finally, in psychoanalysis, doubt is perceived as a phenomenon related to the expression of unconscious psychic processes (Freud, 1900/1997).

Portugal (2006) discusses this issue based on the comparison between: (1) superstitious conviction, which assumes faith in a supernatural external causality; (2) paranoid certainty, whose belief is self-referent and does not allow for rectification; and (3) the bet on the Unconscious in psychoanalysis, in which an internal causality is called into question, but does not exclude the materiality and determination in the randomness of external factors.

The interest of the three fields in myths is also underlined. From the perspective of psychoanalysis (Freud, 1912-1913/1997), myths come to designate the limit of scientific discourse, in which the subject’s relationship with an alterity in its most radical and intuitive form is called into question. This is the point where explanations about the psychic, social and biological origin of the speaking being intersect and to which there is no access except through a logical abstraction. In this sense, the psychoanalytic approach to myth is neither superstitious, nor religious, nor strictly scientific.

This work sought to map the complex links that unite psychoanalysis, romanticism and fantastic literature, clarifying that this constitutes an important and strategic link between the first two. This is not to say that there are no other important channels for transmitting the legacy of romanticism to psychoanalysis (Mann, 1991), which can be verified through the numerous citations to J. W. Goethe, H. Heine (1797-1856) and F. Schiller in Freud’s oeuvre, but also through references - explicit and implicit - to the philosophy of K. W. F. Schlegel (1772-1829), C. C. Carus (1789-1869) and F. Brentano (1838-1917) (Loureiro, 2002a).

It was highlighted that the influence of romanticism and fantastic literature on psychoanalysis is not restricted to its founding moment. It extends throughout Freud’s works, becoming evident in moments of greater metapsychological inventiveness. The discussion around the Uncanny and the second topic was pointed out as crucial moments in which this influence is updated, becoming markedly more manifest.

It was also underlined that the elements arising from this literary genre and this cultural movement are profoundly transformed by psychoanalysis. This process took place in an original and idiosyncratic way (Figueiredo & Loureiro, 2018). Therefore, it is believed that the investigation of the links between psychoanalysis and fantastic literature can contribute to a better understanding of the appropriation and transformation of the romantic heritage in Freud’s work.