Dr Isht­la Singh

The sto­ry of the Gas­par­il­lo fam­i­ly, the Math­uras, be­ing har­rowed by a su­per­nat­ur­al pres­ence has it­self come to haunt the na­tion­al, as well as the in­di­vid­ual, psy­che.

As the spec­tral buck has made his pres­ence felt across so­cial me­dia, fam­i­ly tales of soucouyants and douens have stirred the dusty cob­webs of mem­o­ry, the cloven hoof of La­Di­a­b­lesse has slipped in­to view and the land­scape it­self has tak­en on the dark shim­mer of a look­ing-glass of oth­er­world­ly men­ace.

Here in the frosty sun­shine of an Eng­lish spring, re­moved in so many ways from my one-time life in Trinidad, even I have felt the deep jolt of for­got­ten fa­mil­ial and cul­tur­al sto­ries re­an­i­mat­ing, and the shiv­ery un­easi­ness of the fa­mil­iar and every day once again made strange and un­know­able.

In psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic terms, we have felt the se­duc­tive touch of the un­can­ny.

​The Math­uras, on the oth­er hand, al­lege that they are ac­tu­al­ly liv­ing it. In their telling, the buck, a de­mand­ing en­ti­ty that both pun­ish­es and re­wards, has un­leashed dis­rup­tion and up­heaval in their house­hold which re­mains, de­spite nu­mer­ous and var­ied at­tempts, pow­er­less in its wake. A fam­i­ly life that could once be tak­en for grant­ed as rel­a­tive­ly safe and pro­tect­ed has there­fore been made vul­ner­a­ble and frag­ile; sig­nif­i­cant­ly, from a source with­in. And it is here, in this un­set­tling no­tion of in­ter­nal dis­tur­bance, that the very essence of the un­can­ny has been glimpsed.

The con­cept of ‘the un­can­ny’ in psy­cho­analy­sis is based on Freud’s ideas of Das Un­heim­liche, which is de­rived from the root word Heim­liche, mean­ing “fa­mil­iar”, “not strange”. Freud sug­gests that, just as the ad­di­tion of Un-trans­forms the orig­i­nal word in both form and mean­ing, so too can the negat­ing and strange be in­sert­ed in­to the every­day fa­mil­iar, ren­der­ing it eerie and un­nerv­ing.

With this in mind, it is lit­tle won­der that the haunt­ed house—and here, we can­not help but think of the ac­tu­al Mathu­ra house—is such a com­mon trope in hor­ror: the place we con­sid­er nat­u­ral­ly safe and fa­mil­iar turns out to con­ceal some­thing su­per­nat­u­ral­ly dan­ger­ous and alien.

In ad­di­tion, the house is of­ten a po­tent sym­bol of the self; some­thing that we al­so like to think of as nat­ur­al and known. But the work of psy­cho­analy­sis tells us that we al­so har­bour an un­known, an un­con­scious—things that are re­pressed, that are felt rather than thought; things that are pre-ver­bal and per­haps even a-ver­bal. And when these and oth­er un­known as­pects emerge, in what­ev­er form and du­ra­tion, we, like the Math­uras, ex­pe­ri­ence what the psy­cho­an­a­lyst Stephen Frosh calls the house of the ‘self-made strange’.

​Such ex­pe­ri­ences, whether they sur­face in our­selves or oth­ers, typ­i­cal­ly cause dis­tress and un­ease, but al­so en­gen­der fas­ci­na­tion and cu­rios­i­ty. It is per­haps this un­set­tling, am­biva­lent fea­ture of the un­can­ny that pre­cip­i­tates one of our com­mon, and very or­di­nary, re­spons­es to sto­ries such as the Mathu­ra’s, name­ly, laugh­ter and triv­i­al­i­sa­tion; strate­gies which help us ren­der dif­fi­cult con­tent more bear­able while up­hold­ing our par­tic­u­lar world views.

How­ev­er, such re­ac­tions al­so di­rect our gaze away from the shad­ows out of which the orig­i­nal man­i­fes­ta­tions emerge. In­stead, we scru­ti­nise the hu­man and non-hu­man play­ers of the dra­ma, look­ing for prag­mat­ic mo­tives and con­tain­ing the sto­ry with­in the safe con­fines of jokes and pi­cong. But in do­ing so, we lose sight of a big­ger ques­tion: why does this kind of sto­ry, this par­tic­u­lar su­per­nat­ur­al nar­ra­tion of fear, of vi­o­lent acts, of de­struc­tive forces be­yond our con­trol, emerge in the first place?

​Psy­cho­analy­sis at­tempts to hold such ques­tions in steady fo­cus. Here, ghosts and oth­er su­per­nat­ur­al en­ti­ties are seen as, in Frosh’s words, ‘man­i­fes­ta­tions of per­son­al in­jus­tice, lin­ger­ing re­minders of those that have been mis­treat­ed, dis­placed and left un­recog­nised’. As such, nar­ra­tives of haunt­ing can be seen as ve­hi­cles for ex­press­ing a sense of so­cial, po­lit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic mar­gin­al­i­sa­tion, as well as a deeply-felt but unar­tic­u­lat­ed in­ter­gen­er­a­tional trau­ma; one which is ei­ther per­son­al to the fam­i­ly or en­dem­ic to the cul­ture.

From a psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic point of view, the haunt­ing of the Math­uras can, there­fore, be seen as a pro­jec­tion of a trou­bled, trau­ma­tised in­ter­nal land­scape on­to the ex­ter­nal. We do not know enough about their cir­cum­stances and dy­nam­ics to un­der­stand the per­son­al, sym­bol­ic sig­nif­i­cance of the buck and the mean­ings it car­ries for them. But we can ac­knowl­edge the va­len­cy of an ex­ter­nal land­scape which al­lows for easy map­ping.

The spir­its and demons that in­hab­it Trinidad are not just nar­ra­tive relics of the many races and cul­tures that have walked it but are al­so the mal­con­tent ghosts of con­quest, in­va­sion, ex­ploita­tion, slav­ery, in­den­ture­ship. They em­body the hor­rors of pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions, the in­her­it­ed and desta­bil­is­ing trau­ma of ex­ist­ing on the mar­gins as Oth­er and as such, they in­vite us, as Robert Mc­Far­lane says, to glimpse ‘the skull be­neath the skin’ of the land it­self.

We, there­fore, do not know ex­act­ly what is be­ing im­part­ed by the Math­uras' haunt­ing sto­ry, but it is clear that some­thing of im­por­tance is be­ing raised; that some­thing is be­ing re­quest­ed. In psy­cho­analy­sis, this in it­self would be viewed as hope­ful, as a way in­to an ex­or­cism of the psy­che, even if the overt text of the mes­sage seems strange or in­deed, un­can­ny.

In this case, to re­spond to that at­tempt at com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and to pur­sue it with any hope of suc­cess, would ne­ces­si­tate a deep­er and clos­er en­gage­ment with the fam­i­ly; one that would al­low not on­ly a mea­sure of in­sight in­to the sig­nif­i­cance of the buck specif­i­cal­ly, and of haunt­ing gen­er­al­ly, in their in­ter­nal world but al­so, in­to what tan­gi­ble ar­eas to ad­dress these sym­bol­ise in their ex­ter­nal con­text.

Thus, a sto­ry such as the Mathu­ra’s can be in­ter­pret­ed as a sig­nal that there is work, both psy­cho­log­i­cal and so­cial, to be done. As Frosh says, ‘if a spir­it haunts, then it is not ful­ly lost; the op­por­tu­ni­ty for re­pair ex­ists, for set­tling what needs to be set­tled and pro­vok­ing change where that is what has to be done.’.

A haunt­ing, par­tic­u­lar­ly one such as this which asks for pub­lic en­gage­ment, pro­vides an op­por­tu­ni­ty to bring the spec­tre in­to the light—to see what usu­al­ly pass­es un­seen, to hear what has been si­lenced, and im­por­tant­ly, to take ac­tion where there is need.

Dr Isht­la Singh is a Trinidad-born writer who has pub­lished sev­er­al books on lan­guage and so­ci­ety. She was Read­er in Eng­lish Lan­guage and Lin­guis­tics at King’s Col­lege Lon­don and now works as a psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic psy­chother­a­pist. She cur­rent­ly re­sides in the UK.