ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author explores the emotional factors that are activated at the level of the cultural unconscious that produce experiences of the uncanny that are expressed through phantom narratives. Phantom narratives, a hybridized term, link the personal and social activity of unconscious story formation through psychic presences (images). Phantom narratives are expressions of the unconscious at the level of the group that shows the psyche’s own way of narrating its relationship to the group, through the expressions of cultural, social, and political issues. The uncanny, at the level of the social, is seen as those disturbances of feelings that alienate us from the familiar social world of others. What is uncanny about phantom narratives is how group emotional dynamics are represented as psychic presences. Mobilizing his own subjectivity (as revealed in the author’s use of the psychoanalytic literary genre), the author applies an approach developed within Jungian analytical psychology that is called amplification, which allows for the conscious elaboration of spontaneously occurring symbolic processes to create a meaningful semantic and transitional space context for the exploration of phantom narratives.
