Uncanny (Sigmund Freud) – Nature of Uncanny

 The uncanny is the psychological experience of something as strangely familiar, rather than simply mysterious. The Uncanny is related to what is scary. It arouses dread and horror.

“The uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.”

         The German psychologist Jentsch thought that uncanniness resulted from intellectual uncertainty. Freud thinks this is incomplete. Freud explores the etymology of the word ‘unheimlich’ and its opposite ‘heimlich’. Heimlich means that which is familiar and congenial, and on the other, that which is concealed and kept out of sight. "Unheimlich" is used as the contrary of the first definition but not the second. Everything is unheimlich which ought to have remained concealed but has come to light.

               One manifestation of the uncanny can be found in the example of automata, where inanimate creatures are thought to be alive.  Epileptics strike us in this way too, because their motions are involuntary and mechanical. Freud begins his analysis of "The Sandman". In the story, the strange figure of Olympia, an automaton, breeds a feeling of the uncanny on the reader certainly.

               However, Freud is more interested in Nathaniel's childhood memories of the sandman Coppelius. What is uncanny is the fear of being robbed of one's eyes. This fear occurs in children and continues into adulthood. It is associated with the dread of being castrated. Coppelius, the castrating father, interferes with all love relationships, who supplants (kills) the good father who first protects Nathaniel's "eyes."

                Next Freud turns to the theme of "the double". The double for Otto Rank was originally an insurance against the destruction of the ego. Its source is the primary narcissism of the child from self-love. In early childhood this produces projections of multiple selves. Instead of assuring immortality, the double foreshadows death. This double acts as an observer and critic of the ego, our conscience. But in later life, childhood narcissism has been overcome and the double invokes a sensation of the uncanny.

               The uncanny is the subject of aesthetics as it deals with something fearful and frightening emotional impulses. But aesthetics has neglected to study the uncanny.  Modernism marks a turn toward a fascination with the ugly, the grotesque: a kind of "negative" aesthetics. Freud suggests that we might call it the aesthetics of the "fearful," the aesthetics of anxiety.