Shadow Unbound – Disrupting taboos and acknowledging the shadow through the cathartic experience of negative empathy

Abstract

Negative empathy is an aesthetic experience that combines a drive towards emotional proximity with such unsettling feelings as revulsion and distress. The conflict resulting from the clash between pleasure and inner resistance the subject experiences with negative empathy, naturally induces ethical concerns and moral conundrums. Starting from Theodor Lipps’ primeval outline of the negative empathic experience, this thesis pinpoints and illustrates the formal and conceptual features of negative empathy, tracing its origin back to affect theory and corroborating Suzanne Keen’s claim that negative emotions, more than positive ones, considerably affect readers’ involvement and empathic participation in fictional situations. In line with Bataille’s assertion that, “if literature stays away from evil, it rapidly becomes boring,” this inquiry focuses on cathartic identification to outline how negative feelings and the fascination for evil within the aesthetic literary experience allow for the disruption of Freudian taboos and the acknowledgement of Jungian shadow. Through the analysis and comparison of literary passages that span from drama to fiction, and from poetry to screenplay, this dissertation shows how negative empathy’s intrinsic cathartic potential is able to stir a subject’s strong emotional response and empathic involvement, thus enhancing non-mainstream art reception.