The Sandman

Told first through letters, then by a narrator who cannot decide how to begin, the tale follows Nathanael, a student who takes the barometer-seller Coppola for the return of Coppelius, the lawyer he blames for his father's death and for his childhood dread of the Sandman. Against the steady rationalism of his fiancee Clara, he fixes on Olympia, the silent, faultless daughter displayed by the physicist Spalanzani, and cannot see what she is until two men tear her apart between them.

Hoffmann wrote it in 1816; a century later it became the specimen text of Freud's Das Unheimliche, which reads the threat to the eyes, the doubled father-figures, and the return of the same dread as the machinery of the uncanny. For a clinician it works less as illustration than as a study of a mind that cannot hold the line between perception and projection, that meets the inanimate as though it were alive, and that keeps finding one feared figure inside each new face.