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“The Uncanny" Summary of main concepts (1919)

I. Definition of the Uncanny

A. Aesthetics and Psychoanalysis merged here. The uncanny is the subject of

aesthetics.
Why? Because it has to do with a certain kind of feeling or sensation, with
emotional impulses. But in general aesthetics has neglected to study the uncanny,
preferring to concentrate on beauty and, generally, on more positive emotions: the
attractive, the sublime, etc. The uncanny is something fearful and frightening, and
as such it has been neglected in the history of aesthetics. But Modernism marks a
turn in aesthetics in general toward a fascination with the ugly, the grotesque: a kind
of "negative" aesthetics. Freud's essay makes a contribution to this supplement to
the aesthetics of the "beautiful" by examining what we might call the aesthetics of
the "fearful," the aesthetics of anxiety.
-- Freud will wed psychoanalytic and aesthetic modes of thought to develop his
theory of the uncanny; the theory remains incomplete if it fails to regard both of
these. It is important to keep in mind here that Freud interprets beauty in general as
an "inhibited aim": that is, as a sublimated reflection or manifestation of our erotic
instincts and impulses. See in this regard the Freud Reader, p. 193.
-- This essay provides a brilliant example—perhaps the most stunning one in all of
Freud’s works—of the intertwining of psychoanalysis with another discipline: here,
literary criticism.
-- In this essay Freud plays the part of a literary critic who tries to explain
the effect of a certain kind of literature; he is concerned with literary reception.
Coherent with this literary orientation is the fact that he begins his analysis
with philological considerations: the meaning of the word "uncanny" (unheimlich),
its etymology, history, historical development, general use, etc.
B. What is the uncanny?
-- "Uncanny," p. 195: Freud's definition = uncanny as the class of frightening things
that leads us back to what is known and familiar.
-- Freud's aim: to demonstrate psychoanalytically why this is the case.-- Study of
the German words, heimlich and unheimlich (canny/homey; uncanny/unhomey).

heimlich, first definition = I, a: belonging to the house; friendly; familiar; I, b: tame (as in
animals); I, c: intimate, comfortable; i.e: secure, dometic(ated), hospitable.

heimlich, second definition = concealed, secret, withheld from sight and from others;
secretive, deceitful = private.

-- Note the dialectic of these meanings: what from the perspective of the one who is "at
home" is familiar, is to the outsider, the stranger, the very definition of the unfamiliar, the
secretive, the impenetrable.
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-- The term heimlich embodies the dialectic of "privacy" and "intimacy" that is inherent in
bourgeois ideology. Therefore Freud can associate it with the "private parts," the parts of
the body that are the most "intimate" and that are simultaneously those parts subject to the
most concealment . However, in Freud's understanding the "heimlich" will also be
something that is concealed from the self.

unheimlich: as the negation of heimlich, this word usually only applies to the first set of
meanings listed above:

unheimlich I = unhomey, unfamiliar, untame, uncomfortable = eerie, weird, etc.

unheimlich II (the less common variant) = unconcealed, unsecret; what is made known;
what is supposed to be kept secret but is inadvertently revealed.

-- Note the implicit connection of this notion of the unheimlich to Freud’s concept of
"parapraxis," the inadvertent slip of the tongue that reveals a hidden truth. Schelling’s
definition (p. 199): "Unheimlich is the name for everything that ought to have remained
secret and hidden but has come to light." Unheimlich thus becomes a kind of unwilling,
mistaken self-exposure. In psychoanalytic terms, it provides a surprising and
unexpected self-revelation.

Freud concentrates on the unusual semantics of these 2 terms:

heimlich I = known, familiar; unheimlich I = unknown, unfamiliar

heimlich II = secret, unknown; unheimlich II = revealed, uncovered

The word heimlich thus has a meaning that overlaps with its opposite, unheimlich; the
semantics of this word come full circle.

-- Freud's thesis: unheimlich, the uncanny = revelation of what is private and concealed,
of what is hidden; hidden not only from others, but also from the self.

In Freudian terminology: the uncanny is the mark of the return of the repressed.

WHY IS THE DOPPELGANGER THE PARADIGM OF THE UNCANNY?

-- It represents a psychic “nodal point” with multiple implications, meanings, sources, etc.

AMBIVALENCE: The Double Doubled

“The fact that an agency of this kind [the super-ego] exists, which is able to treat the rest of
the ego like an object--the fact, that is, that man is capable of self-observation--renders it
possible to invest the old idea of a ‘double’ with a new meaning and to ascribe many things
to it--above all, those things which seem to self-criticism to belong to the old surmounted
narcissism of earlier times. But it is not only this latter material, offensive as it is to the
criticism of the ego, which may be incorporated in the idea of a double. There are also all
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the unfulfilled but possible futures to which we still like to cling in phantasy, all the
strivings of the ego which adverse circumstances have crushed [. . .].” “The Uncanny”

Freud's general thesis: The uncanny is anything we experience in adulthood that

reminds us of earlier psychic stages, of aspects of our unconscious life, or of the
primitive experience of the human species.
a. castration
b. double
c. involuntary repetition; the compulsion to repeat (Wiederholungszwang) as a structure of
the unconscious.
d. animistic conceptions of the universe = the power of the psyche. It sees itself as stronger
than reality; e.g. telepathy, mind over matter. These are common conceptions of primitive
life.
The uncanny arises as the recurrence of something long forgotten and repressed,
something superseded in our psychic life = a reminder of our psychic past.

II. The Uncanny in Literature, in Narrative Fiction.

A. Freud claims that not everything that returns from repression is uncanny. Return of the
repressed is a necessary condition for the uncanny, but not a sufficient one. Something
else must also be at play here in order to create the experience of the uncanny.

B. To understand this, Freud returns to the study of fiction for help.

Here we find the 2 sources of the uncanny, its relation to the psychic past, confirmed:
1) uncanny = revival of repressed infantile material = part of individual psychic reality;
2) uncanny = confirmation or return of surmounted primitive beliefs of the human species,
such as animism, etc.

C. Experience of the uncanny in real-life experiences and in fiction are different. Answer =
fantasy is different from reality because it does not undergo reality-testing.
-- Therefore, events that would be uncanny if experienced in real life are not experienced
as such in fiction. Fairy tales, for example, give many instances of uncanny events that are
not experienced by the reader as uncanny. Why? The readers adjust their sensibility to the
fictional world. (See "Uncanny" 227) In other words, since uncanny events seem "normal"
in the fairy-tale world, and we adjust our expectations to the "normal" state of this fictional
reality, we as readers do not gain a sense of the uncanny. Or, we might say: since the
characters in the fictional world of fairy tales do not see fantastic events as unusual or
uncanny, but take them as a matter of course, the reader also is not led to find these things
out of the "ordinary" (for the depicted world).
-- Fiction only creates an uncanny effect if the author makes a pretense to realism; if we
as readers believe that real, actual conditions are being narrated.
-- The experience of the uncanny in literature depends on the discrepancy between real
events and fantastic occurrences in the fictional world. The author promises truth and
verisimilitude, but then breaks this promise. (See "Uncanny" 227)
-- We, as readers of the fiction, must share the perspective of the character who
experiences the uncanny event in the fictional world. See "Uncanny" 229,
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Qualities of Uncanny Fiction

A. Focus is on one central character = the anchor character; events, people, etc. in the
fictional world only have significance in relation to this character. It forms the hub, or
center of all events.

B. External events are seen through the perspective of the anchor character and
colored by his or her psyche; they are projections of the psyche of this fictional character.

C. The text thus takes on the quality of a dream text, with manifest and latent content. The
real and the fantastic (Freud's required ambivalence) form a unity in the
consciousness of the anchor character. This lends some of the events the shimmer of the
symbolic because it is undecidable whether they are real or imagined.

D. Stylistically, uncanny fiction requires a fusion of objective and subjective narrative

styles. We commonly find a realistic frame, which reads like a report or a newspaper
article, which is suddenly ruptured by fantastic events. But this rupture is also related
with the accuracy and detail of objective narration.

E. The reader's perspective must be that of the anchor character; events must be
perceived through his/her eyes, filtered through the psyche of this character.

Only when all of these conditions are met is the experience of the uncanny transferred
from the domain of the fictional world to the receptive experience of the reader.

THE UNCANNY

In the following pages you will find some quotations from Sigmund Freud’s “The
Uncanny”. The full book can be read here:

http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~amtower/uncanny.html

“The uncanny is something which is secretly familiar, which has undergone repression and
then returned from it. Everything that is uncanny fulfils this condition.”

“There is no question, therefore, of any intellectual uncertainty here: we know now that we
are not supposed to be looking on at the products of a madman's imagination, behind which
we, with the superiority of rational minds, are able to detect the sober truth; and yet this
knowledge does not lessen the impression of uncanniness in the least degree. The theory of
intellectual uncertainty is thus incapable of explaining that impression.”

“Death and the re-animation of the dead are typically represented as uncanny themes.”

“Towards the end of the book the reader is told the facts, hitherto concealed from him,
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from which the action springs; with the result, not that he is at last enlightened, but that he
falls into a state of complete bewilderment. The author has piled up too much material of
the same kind. In consequence one’s grasp of the story as a whole suffers, though not the
impression it makes.”

“The Uncanny is something hidden which ought to have remained missed but which is
brought to light.”

“The German word 'unheimlich' is obviously the opposite of 'heimlich' ['homely'],

'heimisch' ['native'] the opposite of what is familiar; and we are tempted to conclude that
what is 'uncanny' is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar.”

“These themes are all concerned with the phenomenon of the ‘double’, which appears in
every shape and in every degree of development. Thus we have characters who are to be
considered identical because they look alike. This relation is accentuated by mental
processes leaping from one of these characters to another — by what we should call
telepathy —, so that the one possesses knowledge, feelings and experience in common with
the other.”

“Or it is marked by the fact that the subject identifies himself with someone else, so that he
is in doubt as to which his self is, or substitutes the extraneous self for his own. In other
words, there is a doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self. And finally there is the
constant recurrence of the same thing - the repetition of the same features or character-traits
or vicissitudes, of the same crimes, or even the same names through several consecutive
generations.”

“The theme of the ‘double’ has been very thoroughly treated by Otto Rank (1914). He has
gone into the connections which the ‘double’ has with reflections in mirrors, with shadows,
with guardian spirits, with the belief in the soul and with the fear of death.”

“For the ‘double’ was originally an insurance against the destruction of the ego, an
‘energetic denial of the power of death’, as Rank says; and probably the ‘immortal’ soul
was the first ‘double’ of the body.”

“This invention of doubling as a preservation against extinction has its counterpart in the
language of dreams, which is fond of representing castration by a doubling or
multiplication of a genital symbol. The same desire led the Ancient Egyptians to develop
the art of making images of the dead in lasting materials. Such ideas, however, have sprung
from the soil of unbounded self-love, from the primary narcissism which dominates the
mind of the child and of primitive man. But when this stage has been surmounted, the
‘double’ reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the
uncanny harbinger of death.”

“The idea of the ‘double’ does not necessarily disappear with the passing of primary
narcissism, for it can receive fresh meaning from the later stages of the ego’s development.
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A special agency is slowly formed there, which is able to stand over against the rest of the
ego, which has the function of observing and criticizing the self and of exercising a
censorship within the mind, and which we become aware of as our ‘conscience’. In the
pathological case of delusions of being watched, this mental agency becomes isolated,
dissociated from the ego, and discernible to the physician’s eye. The fact that an agency of
this kind exists, which is able to treat the rest of the ego like an object — the fact, that is,
that man is capable of self-observation — renders it possible to invest the old idea of a
‘double’ with a new meaning and to ascribe a number of things to it — above all, those
things which seem to self-criticism to belong to the old surmounted narcissism of earliest
times.”

“The factor of the repetition of the same thing will perhaps not appeal to everyone as a
source of uncanny feeling. From what I have observed, this phenomenon does undoubtedly,
subject to certain conditions and combined with certain circumstances, arouse an uncanny
feeling, which, furthermore, recalls the sense of helplessness experienced in some dream-
states.”

“If we take another class of things, it is easy to see that there, too, it is only this factor of
involuntary repetition which surrounds what would otherwise by innocent enough with an
uncanny atmosphere, and forces upon us the idea of something fateful and inescapable
when otherwise we should have spoken only of ‘chance’. For instance, we naturally attach
no importance to the event when we hand in an overcoat and get a cloakroom ticket with
the number, let us say, 62; or when we find that our cabin on a ship bears that number. But
the impression is altered if two such events, each in itself indifferent, happen close together
— if we come across the number 62 several times in a single day, or if we begin to notice
that everything which has a number — addresses, hotel rooms, compartments in railway
trains — invariably has the same one, or at all events one which contains the same figures.
We do feel this to be uncanny. And unless a man is utterly hardened and proof against the
lure of superstition, he will be tempted to ascribe a secret meaning to this obstinate
recurrence of a number; he will take it, perhaps, as an indication of the span of life allotted
to him. Or suppose one is engaged in reading the works of the famous physiologist, Hering,
and within the space of a few days receives two letters from two different countries, each
from a person called Hering, though one has never before had any dealings with anyone of
that name. Not long ago an ingenious scientist attempted to reduce coincidences of this
kind to certain laws, and so deprive them of their uncanny effect. I will not venture to
decide whether he has succeeded or not.”

“For it is possible to recognize the dominance in the unconscious mind of a 'compulsion to

repeat' proceeding from the instinctual impulses and probably inherent in the very nature of
the instincts — a compulsion powerful enough to overrule the pleasure principle, lending to
certain aspects of the mind their daemonic character, and still very clearly expressed in the
impulses of small children; a compulsion, too, which is responsible for a part of the course
taken by the analyses of neurotic patients. All these considerations prepare us for the
discovery that whatever reminds us of this inner 'compulsion to repeat' is perceived as
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uncanny.”

“It seems as if each one of us has been through a phase of individual development
corresponding to this animistic stage in primitive men, that none of us has passed through it
without preserving certain residues and traces of it which are still capable of manifesting
themselves, and that everything which now strikes us as 'uncanny' fulfils the condition of
touching those residues of animistic mental activity within us and bringing them to
expression.”

“An uncanny effect is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination
and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary
appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it
symbolizes, and so on. It is this factor which contributes not a little to the uncanny effect
attaching to magical practices. The infantile element in this, which also dominates the
minds of neurotics, is the over-accentuation of psychical reality in comparison with
material reality — a feature closely allied to the belief in the omnipotence of thoughts.”

“We - or our primitive forefathers - once believed that these possibilities (afterlife) were
realities, and were convinced that they actually happened. Nowadays we no longer believe
in them, we have surmounted these modes of thought; but we do not feel quite sure of our
new beliefs, and the old ones still exist within us ready to seize upon any confirmation. As
soon as somethingactually happens in our lives which seems to confirm the old, discarded
beliefs we get a feeling of the uncanny. Conversely, anyone who has completely and finally
rid himself of animistic beliefs will be insensible to this type of the uncanny. The most
remarkable coincidences of wish and fulfilment, the most mysterious repetition of similar
experiences in a particular place or on a particular date, the most deceptive sights and
suspicious noises — none of these things will disconcert him or raise the kind of fear which
can be described as ‘a fear of something uncanny’. The whole thing is purely an affair of
‘reality-testing’, a question of the material reality of the phenomena.”

“Where the uncanny comes from infantile complexes the question of material reality does
not arise; its place is taken by psychical reality. What is involved is an actual repression of
some content of thought and a return of this repressed content, not a cessation of belief in
the reality of such a content.”

“Our conclusion could then be stated thus: an uncanny experience occurs either when
infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression,
or when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed.”

JUNG'S "THE DOUBLE"

Jung believed that the human psyche was fundamentally contradictory, and that in every
person there are tendencies, feelings, characteristics, and complexes that do not jibe with
ego consciousness. This other self is the double, the alter ego, the dark self, or, as Jung put
it, the shadow. As a component of the unconscious, the shadow loosely corresponds to the
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Freudian unconscious, but Jung distinguished his understanding of the unconscious from
Freud's, which consists primarily of repressed libido.