E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman and Sigmund Freud’s Literary Analysis: Freud Ignores Multiple Personality

On the back cover of the edition of Hoffmann’s short stories that I used, it says: “A lawyer by day and creator of a world of fantasy by night, Hoffmann (1776-1822) lived a Jekyll and Hyde existence. Many of the characters in his stories are subject to a similar split personality” (1).

However, in this case, the idea of “Jekyll and Hyde”—two personalities—is an understatement.

In Hoffmann’s famous short story “The Sandman,” if you count all the characters who are either “doubles” of each other or automatons, you find that five of the characters are alternate personalities: Nathaniel, his father, Coppelius, Coppola, and Olympia.

The Sandman

When Nathaniel was a child, his mother used to send him to bed by announcing, “The sandman is coming,” by which she meant that it was bedtime and he would soon be sleepy. However, the old nursemaid told him that the sandman kidnaps children and gouges out their eyes.

While lying in bed, Nathaniel hears a man visiting his father’s room, recurrently. He wonders if it is the sandman and sneaks in to look. He discovers it is the lawyer Coppelius, and that the two men are creating automatons. Indeed, Coppelius wants to use Nathaniel’s eyes for that purpose.

A year later, in one of these nocturnal visits by Coppelius to Nathaniel’s father, there is an explosion, his father is killed, and Coppelius disappears.

Years later, when Nathaniel is a college student, he meets Coppola, a salesman of optical products, and at first he could swear that Coppola is really Coppelius in disguise. But his physics professor assures him that Coppola and Coppelius are two different people.

The physics professor has a strange daughter, Olympia. Nathaniel thinks she is beautiful, but somehow lifeless. However, when he looks at her through a telescope bought from Coppola, she looks full of life and quite attracted to him. He becomes obsessed and in love with her.

But Nathaniel eventually discovers that Coppola and Coppelius are the same person, and that person, together with the professor, have created Olympia, who is an automaton. Nathaniel becomes insane and dies. The last line of the story describes Nathaniel’s personality as having been “inwardly riven.”

Five Characters as Alternate Personalities

Nathaniel had been described, as a child, as having his limbs screwed on and off by Coppelius. Nathaniel’s father had been described as looking like Coppelius. Coppola is Coppelius’s double. Olympia [is an automaton and her] eyes are said to have been Nathaniel’s. And when Nathaniel is insane at the end, his crazy speech is mechanical, like an automaton whose mechanism has broken. 

So with five characters who are “doubles” or automatons, this is not just a “double” story, but a “multiple” story, a multiple personality story, through and through.

Analysis in Freud’s “The Uncanny”

Freud’s essay on what evokes a feeling of the uncanny—a frightening, disorienting feeling from something unfamiliar—highlights Hoffmann’s writings. “Hoffmann is in literature the unrivaled master of conjuring up the uncanny…” and his “themes are all concerned with the idea of a ‘double’ in every shape and degree” (2). And of all Hoffmann’s writings, Freud chooses “The Sandman” as his prime example. He discusses it at length.

The point here is what Freud does not say. He never mentions multiple personality as a cause for a feeling of the uncanny, as an issue in Hoffmann’s writings, or as related to the theme of the double. The issue of multiple personality never occurs to him. Because Freud, himself, had multiple personality (see post of November 7, 2013), was in denial, and his theories couldn’t account for there being such a thing as multiple personality, even rarely.

Aside from multiple personality’s connection with the theme of the double and Hoffmann’s writings, why should Freud have mentioned it in an essay on the uncanny?

The Uncanniness of Multiple Personality

“When we work with patients with multiple personality disorder, our sense of reality is challenged…the patient has a single human body, but it appears to be the vehicle for the behavior (or ‘lives’) of extremely different persons, many of whom may not even know each other. We have stepped ‘behind the looking glass’…We cannot even identify one personality as the person who is the patient…It is strange, uncanny…” (3).

The Inadequacy of Psychoanalytic Theory

Freud, himself, couldn’t see the relevance of multiple personality to the theme of the double. So whenever “the double” or split personality or multiple personality is at issue, think of Multiple Identity Literary Theory.

1. E. T. A. Hoffmann. Tales of Hoffmann. Selected and Translated with an Introduction by R. J. Hollingdale. Penguin Books, 1982.

2. Sigmund Freud. “The Uncanny” (1919) in On Creativity and the Unconscious: The Psychology of Art, Literature, Love, and Religion. Harper Perennial Modern Thought, 1958/2009.

3. Richard E. Hicks, M.D. “Discussion: A Clinician’s Perspective,” in Richard P. Kluft, M.D., Ph.D. (Ed.), Childhood Antecedents of Multiple Personality. Washington D.C., American Psychiatric Press, 1985, p. 247.