The Uncanny

Freud’s opening remarks in Chapter 1 of “The Uncanny” are an apology for the following discussion of aesthetics, which is “only rarely” of interest to the psychoanalyst. The subject of the uncanny is such an instance, however (123). Freud moves swiftly from aligning the uncanny with that which incites dread to more subtle definitions. Typically, discussions of aesthetics avoid this subject, since they are concerned with the “beautiful, attractive and sublime” (123). Freud cites a “a fertile but not exhaustive paper” by E. Jentsch, to which he refers to repeatedly in the essay.

An initial obstacle to the study of the uncanny, Jentsch says, is the variation in sensitivity among people. This is a problem for the whole of aesthetics. There are two courses of thought in explicating the uncanny. The first is linguistic, and the second is evidential. Freud defines the uncanny as “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar” (124). Freud states that he will show how something familiar can be frightening in the rest of his essay, which is informed by a number of case studies, followed by linguistic analysis.

Freud’s elucidation of the subject of the uncanny begins with a linguistic analysis of the German term unheimlich. This is the opposite of the heimlich or heimisch, which means “familiar” or “homey.” This would suggest that what is frightening is unfamiliar. Yet, Freud contends that only some new things are uncanny. This is the point at which, in Freud’s summation, Jentsch leaves off. For Jentsch, the “essential factor” in the uncanny is “intellectual uncertainty,” which is related to disorientation (124). This definition of the uncanny is incomplete, Freud claims.

Citing Th. Reik, Freud reproduces an etymology of the term heimlich in various languages. Freud will draw on this semantic field for the remainder of the essay. He also cites Daniel Sanders’s 1860 publication Worterbuch der deutschen Sprache, which also aligns the term heimlich with the home, and its members. The German translation of the Bible typically uses the term in relation to secret knowledge (for example Gen. xli: 45 and Sam. xxiii: 23). The term is related to Geheimnis, meaning “secret.” Other associations cited from Gutzkow include magic and conspiracy. The unheimlich, meanwhile, pertains to ghostliness, or, as Schelling puts it, “everything that ought to have remained […] hidden and secret and has become visible” (132).

What Freud draws from this lengthy list of connotations is the commonality between the meanings of heimlich and its apparent opposite, the unheimlich. Gutzkow corroborates this equivalence: “We call it unheimlich; you call it heimlich” (133). The notion of the uncanny is thus predicated on an essential ambiguity. Freud then looks to Grimm’s dictionary to further elucidate the term, where the idea of sightlessness is added to the canon of definitions for heimlich. Still more important is the idea of “that which is obscure, inaccessible to knowledge” (133).

Freud concludes, “thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops towards an ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich” (133). This distinction is not yet fully clear, and in Part 2 of the essay, Freud will undertake to elucidate it further through “individual instances of uncanniness” (133).