The Sandman

Early in the essay, Freud makes an interesting move from the first-person I, which he has used heretofore, to a third-person reference to 

Freud s goal, more than anything else, is to deconstruct the integrity of the uncanny as a mere phenomenon of intellectual certainty. Samuel Weber writes on the question  

In his reading of this text [ The Sandman ], Freud insists that intellectual Uncertainty —the term introduced by Jentsch, his predecessor in the study of the uncanny— is not what counts. It is not, he insists, uncertainty or delusion 

The haunting return of the rational cannot help but recall ambivalence. It would seem at first glance that, like ambivalence, the uncanny is a term that might wish to be other, something deeply structuring in the psyche but that persists in returning to the real, to the realm of the intellect. We shall have to see, then, by what force it achieves this return and what sort of resistance is mounted by Freud (or by the text itself) in the process. 

through his illicit or unsanctioned viewing, Nathanael s figure of the Sandman is collapsed with his actual knowledge of a person, a professional man whom he has met during the day (in the light) on a number of occasions. 

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In the hopes of putting an end to the specter of the Sandman by discovering who he is, whom he resembles, he discovers that the Sandman names the violence of a certain dissemblage, which provokes fear and loathing, to be sure, but which also invokes fascination and desire. For what is most noteworthy... 

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