ABSTRACT
This chapter returns to the uncanny in literature that help set up the dialogue between Freud and Schelling in the introduction. Through in-depth analysis of Schelling’s Lectures on Mythology, the argument centers on the dual function of language as both symptom and cure. The claim here is that we can better understand Freud’s interpretive method through Schelling’s radical assertion that we ought to read mythology literally—that is, that mythology means what it is. Schelling understands mythology as both a defense against, and a true expression of, the traumatic emergence of time. With the help of Jonathan Lear’s reading of Freud in Love and its Place in Nature, the discussion turns to an examination of the psychoanalytic symptom, too, as a revelation/concealment of an archaic self-understanding. As with mythology, the very form of the symptom is an irruption of a primal subjectivity, one that always reopens the limits between internal and external, self and other, activity and passivity—a reopening that characterizes the uncanny.
