Primitive Fantasies that Return. The Sinister in La mujer desnuda (1950), by Armonía Somers

Abstract

Understood within the zone of the repressed, sexuality occupies a tense territory between the forbidden and transgression. The representations it adopts are also the product of this tension and generate an imbalance that affects not only the construction of subjectivity but also the society that is structured upon this repression. This paper will address the appearance of sex as a trigger of unconscious matter according to Freud’s early psychoanalytic texts and will study the operation of the sinister in an aesthetic platform that links the novel by Armonia Somers to surrealism by deploying common strategies around automatism, the disintegration of identity and the singularization of writing.