Friedrich Nietzsche’s Essay “On the Genealogy of Morality” (1887): The birth of morality as a reaction to the struggle for existence Introduction: The concept of “unheimliche” as a return of the repressed childhood horror Friedrich Nietzsche’s essay “On the Genealogy of Morality” (“Zur Genealogie der Moral”, 1887) represents not just a literary and psychological analysis, but a foundational work on the aesthetics and psychology of fear, where E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Christmas tale “The Sandman” becomes a key clinical and cultural example. Nietzsche uses this novella to illustrate his thesis that the “unheimliche” is not something fundamentally new or alien, but a return of a long-known, but repressed childhood experience, often associated with trauma. In this context, Christmas serves not as a celebration, but as a chronological marker, fixing the moment of a psychological catastrophe. The concept of “unheimliche”: Linguistic and psychoanalytic analysis Nietzsche begins with a linguistic analysis of the German word unheimlich (frightening, eerie). He shows that its antonym heimlich means not only “domestic, cozy”, but also “hidden, secret”. Thus, unheimlich is not just “not-domestic”, but something that should have remained hidden, but has emerged. This semantic field leads to the psychoanalytic core: the unheimliche is that which was once heimlich, familiar, part of the “home” of the psyche (such as childhood fears, complexes), but was repressed, and now returns in an altered, alien form, causing anxiety. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” as a model of Christmas trauma Nietzsche analyzes Hoffmann’s novella in detail, highlighting the structuring elements of neurosis. Christmas as the scene of the initial trauma: The climax of the little Nathanial’s childhood fears occurs exactly on Christmas Eve. He, waiting for gifts, spies on his father and the sinister lawyer Koppelyus (a prototype of the Sandman — a mythical creature throwing sand in the eyes of children to make them fall asl ... Read more