Abstract
My submission aims to connect Walter B. Cannon's original research in the field of fatal psychogenetic shock, popularly referred to as "voodoo death" from 1940s, with the anthropological theory of representational magic, which has been famously described in Frazer's Golden Bough and Freud's Totem and Taboo.
Based on information acquired from both fields, I try to interpret scenes from literary works which deal with the destruction of a perfectly beautiful portrait and the "magical connection", leading to the destruction of the subject; or vice versa scenes, where sudden death of a person is announced by a spontaneous self-destruction of a portrait. This topos is known from the ancients and has been re-popularized by 19th century Schwarzromantik (A.
Blackwood, E. A.
Poe, O. Wilde).
It demarcates a clear but trespassable borderline between the aesthetic and the magical function of artistic representation. In the end, I am posing the question whether the underestimation of the permeasablity of this borderline between the aesthetic and the magical approach to self-representation cannot be the cause of many negative psychological effects of pathological behaviour on social networks.