Sigmund Freud. Sinister

Only on rare occasions does the psychoanalyst feel an incentive to engage in aesthetic observations - even when aesthetics is not reduced to the doctrine of the beautiful, but is defined as the doctrine of the qualities of our feeling. He works in other layers of psychic life and deals little with those impulses of feeling - devoid of a clear purpose, muted and dependent on so many accompanying constellations - which most often constitute the material of aesthetics. However, from time to time it happens that he must become interested in a certain area of ​​aesthetics, and usually this area lies somewhere on the sidelines, left unattended by the special literature on aesthetics. Such an area is "sinister." There is no doubt that it belongs to the eerie, awe-inspiring and terrifying; it is equally true that this word is not always used in a clearly defined sense, so that most often it generally coincides in meaning with the frightening one. But we still have the right to expect that the use of a special word-concept is justified by the presence of some special essence. We would like to know what this single essence is, which makes it possible to single out the “sinister” inside the terrible.