according to Freud’s understanding, claims that “the uncanny” is a result of a feeling of
intellectual insecurity.
Gothic novels are full of such uncanny effects – simultaneously frightening, unfamiliar and yet
also strangely familiar.
605942 thesis
As a psychologist, it is still a matter of curiosity why Freud chose a subject from the aesthetics as
the discussion of his study. Derrida mentions in his Writing and Difference that “Freud loved the
arts and (literature, poetry, music) and this essay is an example of how he uses them to affirm
and describe his ideas. The most obvious example of this process in his writing is the Oedipus
complex” (qtd. in Noam Israeli, 383). It is apparent that Freud enjoyed arts and borrowed from
its notions while naming his psychological concepts. Besides his interest towards art, Freud may
intentionally choose his subjects from aesthetics as both literature and psychoanalysis search for
the hidden and implicit meanings. Portier points out why Freud made a detailed study on the
uncanny and why it was of great importance to him as follows:
“Freud’s understanding of modern human psychology and the psychoanalytic process relies on
the uncanny. The “talking cure” is intended to call to light that which is simultaneously hidden
but central to the patient’s hysteria or other psychological condition. The patient must experience
the uncanny to break through and set foot on the path towards a cure. This is one explanation for
why Freud took up the uncanny as the subject of an essay despite his claim that he does not
normally deal with problems of aesthetics.” (29)
By generating his essay on the uncanny, he not only started a new genre in literary criticism, but
also initiated a discussion on the subject which is still in progress.
As Anneleen Masschelein suggests, “the bulk of the critical and theoretical reception of “Das
Unheimliche” is located in the field of aesthetics: literary theory and criticism, art history,
philosophy, architecture and cultural studies. The growing interest in the uncanny in literary
studies first occurred in the late sixties, early seventies, and coincided with the transition of
structuralism to poststructuralism” (4). There are many contemporary interpretations on the
concept of the the uncanny.
Freud 1919
It is evident that we must be prepared to admit that there are other elements besides those set
down here determining the production of uncanny feelings. We might say that these preliminary
results have satisfied psychoanalytic interest in the problem of the uncanny, and that what
remains probably calls for an aesthetic valuation. But that would be to open the door to doubts
about the exact value of our general contention that the uncanny proceeds from something
familiar which has been repressed. One thing we may observe which may help us to resolve
these uncertainties: nearly all the instances which contradict our hypothesis are taken from the
realm of fiction and literary productions. This may suggest a possible differentiation between the
uncanny that is actually experienced, and the uncanny as we merely picture it or read about it.
It is only rarely that a psychoanalyst feels impelled to investigate the subject of aesthetics even
when aesthetics is understood to mean not merely the theory of beauty, but the theory of the
qualities of feeling. He works in other planes of mental life and has little to do with those
subdued emotional activities which, inhibited in their aims and dependent upon a multitude of
concurrent factors, usually furnish the material for the study of aesthetics. But it does
occasionally happen that he has to interest himself in some particular province of that subject;
and then it usually proves to be a rather remote region of it and one that has been neglected in
standard works.
As good as nothing is to be found upon this subject in elaborate treatises on aesthetics, which in
general prefer to concern themselves with what is beautiful, attractive and sublime, that is with
feelings of a positive nature, with the circumstances and the objects that call them forth, rather
than with the opposite feelings of unpleasantness and repulsion. I know of only one attempt in
medicopsychological literature, a fertile but not exhaustive paper by E. Jentsch.2 But I must
confess that I have not made a very thorough examination of the bibliography, especially the
foreign literature, relating to this present modest contribution of mine, for reasons which must be
obvious at this time;3 so that my paper is presented to the reader without any claim of priority
In his famous paper on the Uncanny Freud complained that philosophers studying aesthetics
had contented themselves with studying positive aesthetic experiences such as the beautiful, the
pleasant etc. Freud even used the sublime as an example of a positive emotion that philosophers
had studied. To redress this perceived imbalance Freud wanted to study a largely negative human
aesthetic experience; the experience of the uncanny.
Freud’s treatment of the uncanny was excellent; but anyone who has read philosophers
like Kant will be taken aback by Freud’s claims about the sublime. The concept of the sublime;
far from being a purely positive emotional experience actually involves many negative emotions.
In Freud’s analysis, then, the uncanny is always something to do with “animism, magic and
sorcery, the omnipotence of thoughts, man’s attitude to death, involuntary repetition and the
castration complex”.53 This list comprises “practically all the factors which turn something
frightening into something uncanny”.54 And yet, immediately following this assertion, Freud
remarks that “we can also speak of a living person as uncanny”.55 This “also” extends itself
throughout the essay such that, in the final reckoning, epilepsy, madness, dead bodies,
fragmented bodies, live burial, silence, solitude and darkness can also produce the uncanny, as
can any effacement of the distinction between imagination and reality. Freud himself, it would
appear, suffers from the uncanny’s unsettling occurrence, continuing to add new causes and
examples to his eclectic list well into the final pages of the essay. Doubt, however, can be
generative, and it is Freud’s sustained attempt to explain the contradictions in his theory that
steers him to his discovery that these antinomies all stem “from the realm of fiction, of
imaginative writing”.56 Freud, for his part, does submit several tentative definitions of the
uncanny - always qualified - that shed some light as to its “secret nature”.57 The following is the
most crucial:
If psychoanalytic theory is correct in maintaining that every affect belonging to an emotional
impulse, whatever its kind, is transformed, if it is repressed, into anxiety, then among instances
of frightening things there must be one class in which the frightening element can be shown to be
something repressed which recurs. This class of frightening things would then constitute the
uncanny; and it would be a matter of indifference whether what is uncanny was itself originally
frightening or whether it carried some other effect.58
In this brief passage, Freud succinctly details the mechanism that underpins his conception of the
uncanny. Quite simply, the uncanny is the experience of a return, a return of something that has
been repressed (an anxiety), or previously surmounted (superstitious/animistic belief).59 There
are two aspects to this mechanism: the occasion of the return, experienced as unfamiliar, and the
(once) familiar belief/ content that recurs to consciousness. Therefore, while the return can be
experienced as frightening, the thing that returns need not be frightening in and of itself. Thus,
for Freud, the uncanny is not so much a content or object, but a temporality, a return of the past
that makes the unfamiliar familiar (or vice versa). It is this temporal rupture, internal to the
subject that, for Freud, constitutes the uncanny.60 This would seem to be relatively straight-
forward. However, as Freud admits several pages later, this definition only satisfies the
“psychoanalytic interest in the problem of the uncanny, and that what remains probably calls for
an aesthetic inquiry”,61 prompting him to concede that there are undoubtedly “other elements
besides those which we have so far laid down as determining the production of uncanny
feelings”.62 Moreover, the very existence of these other elements “open the door to doubts about
what exactly is the value of our general contention that the uncanny proceeds from something
familiar which has been repressed”.63 Despite the seemingly endless profusion of causes Freud
finds himself grappling with, he ultimately retreats to the relative clarity of his psychical theory
of its operation. Indeed, as Freud’s essay progresses it becomes clear that, for him, the uncanny
is in fact two ostensibly irreconcilable phenomena, a psychoanalytic uncanny and a
representational uncanny: “we should differentiate between the uncanny that we actually
experience and the uncanny that we merely picture or read about”.64 These comments come
toward the end of Freud’s essay, and yet the entire essay is presented as an investigation into
aesthetics, however haphazard.65 Indeed, “The ‘Uncanny’” famously opens with a curiously
uncharacteristic rhetorical defence of the work, a sort of apology for delving into this field; for it
is only rarely, he claims, “that the psychoanalyst feels impelled to investigate the subject of
aesthetics”.66 For Freud, then, the uncanny falls under the purview of aesthetics, understood not
simply as the “theory of beauty” but “the theory of the qualities of feeling”67 and, more
specifically, “feelings of repulsion and distress”.68 Just what constitutes aesthetics or indeed the
aesthetic experience and, by extension, what status and consideration such a field should be
accorded within the psychoanalytic framework is, however, one of the great unresolved binds at
the heart of “The ‘Uncanny’”. Even so, what can be determined from Freud’s text is that his
“aesthetic inquiry”, if such it is, dwells almost exclusively on literature
The uncanny gives rise to anxiety, but, as Freud says, not everything that causes dread and fear
is uncanny. Freud proceeds in his analysis on two main paths: the first being an historical,
etymological analysis of the meaning of the word “unheimlich”; and the second, what one might
call an aesthetic analysis, by which Freud makes use of art in order to get a grasp of the
phenomenon in question. In addition to this, in characteristic manner, Freud intersperses the
essay with a variety of examples from psychoanalysis.
A_New_Age_of_the_Uncanny_An_Exploration
Sigmund Freud’s essay The Uncanny was published. Frustrated that aesthetic theorists of the
sublime “prefer to concern themselves with what is beautiful, attractive … rather than with the
opposite feelings of unpleasantness and repulsion, ” the text was an early investigation of the
more uncomfortable aspects of aesthetic and psychological experience. In this essay, I apply
Freud’s ideas of the uncanny to contemporary art and cultural criticism, with particular regard to
the current day experiences of technological advancements.
The haunted house perhaps remains the solidest cultural vision of the uncanny – a quintessential
image of the usually mundane domestic sphere turned sinister. Looking back on the 20th century
use of the now formulaic horror narrative setup: a conventional family or couple beginning a
new life in the idyll of a suburban or rural home, which soon falls into disarray and dread, we
can begin to unveil a wider societal discontent. The Late Victorian, Gilded-Age mansion was
first cemented as ‘haunted’ within the public psyche when Charles Addams’ Addams Family
cartoons featured in The New Yorker presented such homes in a cultural context of gothic,
decaying weirdness (Figure 1), birthing the archetypal ‘haunted house’ visualisation . This
symbol of death and decay simultaneously manifested into reality during the great depression; as
the middle classes moved into new, modernist 20th century homes, the dilapidated Victorian
mansions were either abandoned or taken over by struggling working-class boarders and
immigrants .
Since this early 20th century concept of the haunted house arising from economic disarray, the
uncanny flipside of the dwelling in mainstream horror has continued to lend itself as a gothic
metaphor for societal disquiet.
katarzynakozak,+4_Forum+II
At the turn of the 20st century the uncanny covered a broad spectrum of problems in various
fields of study from "political and social alienation" to "disturbing unhomeliness" (Masschelein
2011, 147). The uncanny started to be perceived as a literary concept as it became an integral
part of today' s literature and literary theory. Harold Bloom takes notice of Freud's contribution
to "aesthetics, literary criticism and theory, but, above all, [ ... ] to the resistant strangeness of
literature" (Roy le 2003, 15). One might even say that literature and the uncanny are
interdependent as one is haunted by another, taking into consideration the fact that Freud's
examples in his psychoanalytical essay were based purely on literature. David Farell Krell even
claims that they are "marvellously narrated and beautifully crafted pieces ofwriting" (Royle
2003, 52, 14-15). The new figures such as "cyborg or technologically enhanced human" were
added in literature and literary studies to already existing motifs of the double and robotics,
where the protagonists are usually haunted by the past and have to deal with trauma and the loss
of identity (Masschelein 2011, 149). Masahiro Mori introduced the uncanny in the robotics and
at the same time popularized the concept of the uncanny valley. As he put it, the term uncanny
valley refers to "the [ ... ] relation between the human likeness of an entity and the perceiver's
affinity for it" (Mori 2012, 2). Jentsch drew similar conclusions in "On the Psychology of the
Uncanny" and the following passage proves the significance of his intellectual uncertainty and
the notion of psychical helplessness in development of the uncanny in the field of modern
technology, as it constantly casts doubts on Cartesianism:
Another article
It is apparent that Freud enjoyed arts and borrowed from its notions while naming his
psychological concepts. Besides his interest towards art, Freud may intentionally choose his
subjects from aesthetics as both literature and psychoanalysis search for the hidden and implicit
meanings. Portier points out why Freud made a detailed study on the uncanny and why it was of
great importance to him as follows:
Freud’s understanding of modern human psychology and the psychoanalytic process relies on the
uncanny. The “talking cure” is intended to call to light that which is simultaneously hidden but
central to the patient’s hysteria or other psychological condition. The patient must experience the
uncanny to break through and set foot on the path towards a cure. This is one explanation for
why Freud took up the uncanny as the subject of an essay despite his claim that he does not
normally deal with problems of aesthetics. (29)
By generating his essay on the uncanny, he not only started a new genre in literary criticism, but
also initiated a discussion on the subject which is still in progress.
The emergence of the uncanny in art is generally located in the lateeighteenth or early-nineteenth
century, in Gothic novels and Romantic short stories by writers such as E. T. A. Hoffmann and
Edgar Allan Poe.
Unhinging_the_Familiar_The_Uncanny_in_Th
"We would like to know what this common core is that enables us to distinguish what is uncanny
from what is frightening. There is hardly anything on the subject in contemporary aesthetics
guides, which are mostly concerned with what is nice, uplifting and attractive – positive feelings,
and the circumstances and objects that trigger them – rather than with feelings of an opposite
kind, and with the repulsive and distressful" (Freud, 1919h: 229-230, own translation)
