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Chapter 4 • Nicola Mai
influence of old national myths” (Anzulovic, 1999: 145-146). It might be
added that this was exacerbated by the historical continuity and unbroken
hegemony of a narcissist and collectivist mode of subjectivation within the
Serbian culture. The Serbian people seemed particularly receptive to narratives
of annihilation, and feelings of rage grew with their perceived loss
of power due to the fall from a position they had felt entitled to in the name
of their perceived moral superiority. Beyond this, the main responsibility
for what happened falls upon the political and cultural elite of Belgrade,
who were able to evoke repressed anxieties and fantasies of extermination
in order to maintain a position of material, political and cultural privilege
unaltered by the process of democratization.
In the words of Sigmund Freud, “every affect belonging to an emotional
impulse, whatever its kind, is transformed, if it is repressed, into anxiety”
(Freud, 1955a: 241). Thus, the feeling of anxiety or anguish emerging
when one sees something “uncanny” should be perceived as an indication
of “something repressed that recurs” (Freud, 1955a: 241, emphasis in
text). Something that comes to be perceived as “uncanny” represents, in
reality, “nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and wellestablished
in the mind and which has become alienated from it only
through the process of repression” (Freud, 1955a: 241).
Freud emphasizes how the uncanny elements seem to re-present and reactualize
elements removed from previous stages of individual and
collective cultural and social formations. This would be evident in the fantasies
of omnipotence characterizing the phase of primary narcissism, and
in the ancient animistic conception of a world “characterized by the subject’s
narcissistic overvaluation of his own mental processes; by the belief
in the omnipotence of thought… and by all other creations with the help
of which men, in the unrestricted narcissism of that stage of development,
strove to fend off the manifest prohibitions of reality” (Freud, 1955a: 240).
In Freud’s vision, these ideas were not limited to early humanity:
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Each of us has been through a phase of individual development corresponding
to this animistic stage… none of us [have] passed though it without
preserving certain residues and traces of it which are still capable of
manifesting themselves, and that everything which now strikes us as
“uncanny” fulfils the condition of touching those residues of animistic
mental activity within us and bring them to expression (Freud, 1955a:
240-1).
Applied to the actions of the conservative Serb cultural and political elite,
Freud’s idea suggests that this elite, also, succeeded in maintaining its
privileges and power through the elaboration and implementation of their