The Uncanny

In Freud’s opening comments, he states that a “neglected” region of aesthetics is that which elicits unpleasurable emotions, namely dread and horror. In this, as well as his heavy references to E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” he shares a project with writers of Gothic fiction, such as Mary Shelley. It is generally agreed that Gothic fiction originated with the 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto by British author Horace Walpole. Its second edition was titled A Gothic Story, and it paved the way for a new genre of literature that included Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the poetry of Lord Byron and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. While the Gothic novel was primarily a British phenomenon, the word “Goth” derives from the Goths, an eastern Germanic people. So, in a sense, by referencing the genre, Freud repatriates the term. British Gothic literature is often linked with the roughly simultaneous flowering of the German Schauerroman, or “shudder novel.” Both genres share tropes including medievalism, castles, ghosts, and monsters.

For Freud, the potency of the aesthetic found in Gothic fiction and German and British Romantic literature is due to the primacy of the archaic in the human psyche. The primitive animistic beliefs of “uncivilized” societies that are retained in such literature find root, Freud says, in an “infantile morbid anxiety from which the majority of human beings have never become quite free” (159). It might be said that Freud’s reliance upon literature and semantics to illustrate his argument is itself uncanny. Literary echoes, both announced and implicit, are everywhere in Freud’s essay on the uncanny, and Freud becomes lost in them on more than one occasion: “[W]e have drifted into this field of research half involuntarily, through the temptation to explain certain instances which contradicted our theory of the causes of the uncanny” (147).Freud opens his essay on the uncanny with the admission that psychoanalysts are rarely concerned with aesthetics, yet this and numerous other of his essays engage deeply with literature. 

The concept of the uncanny is also intrinsic to one of the most famous ideas of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. In the posthumously-published The Will to Power (1901), Nietzsche’s epithet for nihilism can be seen as uncanny. The notion of the uncanny is central to Nietzsche’s thought from an early stage. In On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) Nietzsche claims that the “will to truth” is responsible for the abeyance of metaphysics in Western culture. Thus, Nietzsche claims that what he calls “European nihilism” is the shadow of post-Enlightenment thought, which accompanied the decline of Christianity as the dominant ideology in Europe. For Freud, too, the anxiety that accompanies an awareness of death is aroused in experiences of the uncanny. Ontological questions are central to both Freud and Nietzsche’s notions of the uncanny. 

While Jentsch argued that Olympia, the lifelike doll, is the central uncanny figure in Hoffman’s tale, Freud argues that an entirely different element of the story is the basis of the uncanny effect it produces. For Freud, the locus of the uncanny in the story the idea of sightlessness. Likewise, in the anecdote in which Freud surprises himself in the mirror of his train compartment door, what produces a sense of the uncanny is not the double or reflection itself, but the revelation that what he saw was not what he had initially taken it to be. The uncanny, then, has to do with the way that something is perceived, and not just in the physical sense, but rather “how independent emotional effects can be of the actual subject matter in the world of fiction” (155).

For Freud, the anxiety attached to the phobia of eye-damage is the clue that the arousal of this feeling is in fact to do with the childhood phobia of castration. Nathaniel’s problems with perception (his madness) are uncanny for the reader. Freud also writes about deja-vu, the intense feeling of familiarity when one is confronted by a new situation. Like the uncanny, deja-vu has to do with the relationship between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Freud’s explanation is that much like the uncanny, deja-vu occurs when the unconscious fantasy rises to the surface. Thus, both phenomena are a kind of ontological trompe-l’oeil. 

Derived from the Anglo-Saxon root “ken,” meaning knowledge, cognizance or perception, the uncanny for Freud is evidently an ontological phenomenon. Freud makes this plain when he writes, “the whole matter is one of ‘testing reality,’ pure and simple, a question of the material reality of the phenomena” (157). In creative writing, the uncanny arises therefore at the intersection between the real and the fantastical. However, more “primitive” peoples had other ways of explaining and transcribing the uncanny. Freud relates the uncanny to an animistic conception of the universe. Animistic beliefs arise when events seem synchronistic, giving the impression that mind predominates over matter in magical ways. Freud claims that the narcissistic belief in the primacy of thoughts over the laws of reality is latent in the obsessional neurotic’s relation of “analogous experiences” 141). Freud expends many more pages on animism in his foundational text Totem and Taboo:

It would appear that we invest with a feeling of uncanniness those impressions which lend support to a belief in the omnipotence of thoughts, and to the animistic attitude of mind, at a time when our judgment has already rejected these same beliefs (7).

One of the most successful psychoanalysts after Freud was French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Highly influential in the 1960s and 1970s, Lacan took from Freud an emphasis on the centrality of the literary as a metaphor for understanding the human psyche. Lacan’s most famous statement is “the unconscious is structured like a language.” Known for his equivocal statements and impenetrability, Lacan’s theories about and use of language build on Freud’s ideas about the import of aesthetics for understanding the human psyche. Lacan developed complex ideas about what he called the “Symbolic realm” and the signifier. In his Seminar V, Lacan builds on Freud’s emphasis on the resonances between literary and psycho-analysis:

[…] that there are in the unconscious signifying chains which subsist as such, and which from there structure, act on the organism, influence what appears from the outside as a symptom, this is the whole basis of analytic experience (Seminar V; 21.05.58).

Not only does Lacan build on Freud’s explorations of the links between language and the psyche, but the notion of the uncanny is a central building block in Lacan’s thought, and specifically Lacan’s ideas about anxiety. For Lacan, the uncanny situates us in manner where good and bad are indistinguishable. This provokes an anxiety that Lacan argues is revelatory of The Real, that which is irreducible to any signifier. Freud’s ideas about ontological uncertainty in The Uncanny are seminal in the development of Lacan’s thought. 

Literary critic Julia Kristeva is another influential disciple of Freud. Her concept of abjection entails an adverse reaction (horror) to a breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of distinction between subject and object. In the Powers of Horror (1941), Kristeva takes the sight of a corpse as her ultimate example for what causes abjection. Kristeva claims that such a sight can make meaning collapse. Like Freud’s uncanny, the threat of death is present in the “intellectual uncertainty” produced by such a sight (12). For Kristeva, other items provoke the same reaction: the skin that forms on the surface of warm milk, an open wound, sewage.

The abject is excluded from the symbolic order of intersubjective community and societal meaning. Just as Freud’s uncanny reawakens “infantile morbid anxiety” (20), so the abject entails what Kristeva calls “primal repression,” a point in psychosexual development in which we separate ourselves from the animal. In his 1957 Seminar, “Les Formations de L’inconscient,” Lacan introduced a term that relates to the abject, “l’objet petit a.” In contrast to the abject, objet petit a signifies the object or cause of desire, which is eternally unattainable. The “a” in the formulation refers to autre, conveying a sense of otherness derived from Freud’s ideas about the “object,” and the otherness entailed in the unheimlich, or uncanny.