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WorkSigmund Freud

The 'Uncanny'

Why a doll, a double or a street one keeps returning to can chill the blood: each is something once familiar, come back.

by Sigmund Freud74 passages held

  • German, the original language
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Original title
Das Unheimliche
First published
(aged 63)
Original language
German

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Overview

In E. T. A. Hoffmann's tale "The Sandman" a student falls in love with Olimpia, a professor's daughter who turns out to be a mechanical doll. Ernst Jentsch, a German psychiatrist, had used her in 1906 to explain the feeling of the uncanny: it comes, he argued, from intellectual uncertainty, from not knowing whether a thing is alive or dead. Sigmund Freud's essay of 1919 disagrees. The doll, he argues, is not what makes the story frightening. Its centre is the Sandman himself, who in a nurse's tale throws sand into children's eyes until they spring out, and in dreams and myths the fear of losing one's eyes stands in for the fear of castration. For his own account Freud copies out the dictionary entries for the German heimlich, which means homely and familiar but also hidden and secret, and shows the word drifting until it means the same as its opposite, unheimlich. The uncanny, he concludes, is something once familiar that has been repressed and comes back: the double, the involuntary repetition, the dead who seem to return. His own example is a hot summer afternoon in a small Italian town, where he walked quickly out of a street of painted women at the windows and, after some wandering, found himself back in it. In passing he points to a compulsion to repeat strong enough to override the pleasure principle, and to a longer treatment he had ready, which appeared a year later as Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Imago published the essay in 1919, with Freud's admission that, for reasons of the times that readers could guess, he had not searched the literature properly, least of all in foreign languages. Alix Strachey's English version followed in 1925. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan returned to it in his seminar on anxiety in 1962–63.

Key concepts

Why does Freud treat the uncanny as a question of aesthetics?

Because he takes aesthetics in a wider sense than the study of beauty: as the study of the qualities of our feelings. Handbooks of aesthetics, he notes, prefer the beautiful and sublime and say almost nothing about feelings of repulsion and dread. The uncanny is one of those neglected feelings, and a psychoanalyst, used to the hidden side of mental life, has something to say about it.

What are the two sources of the uncanny?

Freud distinguishes them at the end of the essay. One is repressed childhood complexes, such as the fear of castration or fantasies about the womb, revived by some impression. The other is primitive beliefs that we have surmounted, such as that the dead return or that thoughts can kill, which some event seems to confirm.

What is the compulsion to repeat, in The Uncanny?

It is a tendency, rooted in the drives, to repeat the same thing regardless of whether it brings pleasure. Freud says it is strong enough to override the pleasure principle and lends some sides of mental life a demonic character, plain in children and in neurotics. Whatever reminds us of this inner compulsion is felt as uncanny.

What does Freud mean by surmounted beliefs?

He means convictions that our ancestors held and that each of us held as a child, but that educated adults have given up: that wishes come true by themselves, that the dead live on nearby, that secret powers are at work. Surmounted does not mean destroyed. The old belief survives underneath, which is why an event that seems to prove it can still make us shiver.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

When the Familiar Turns Strange

Why do certain things chill us more than anything plainly dangerous? Freud starts from a word and a story, and finds that the uncanny is something once known.

Ernst Jentsch had traced the feeling to uncertainty, as before a doll that might be alive. Freud finds that too thin. He copies out the dictionary entries for heimlich, homely and also secret, and watches the word slide into its opposite. In Hoffmann's 'The Sandman' the real dread is the figure who takes children's eyes, which Freud ties to the fear of castration. His conclusion borrows Schelling's line: the uncanny is what should have stayed hidden and has come to light, the repressed returning.

  • uncanny
  • semantics
  • language
  • familiarity
  • home
  • secrecy
  • concealment
  • repression
  • intellectual uncertainty

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What Comes Back

Doubles, recurring numbers, a street one cannot escape: why does repetition so often feel like fate? Freud traces each case to something we outgrew but never lost.

The double once protected the self against death and now announces it. Involuntary return, as in Freud's own wandering back into the same street, recalls a compulsion to repeat that runs deeper than pleasure. A number met again and again revives the old belief that thoughts can act on the world. Freud sorts these into two kinds of source: repressed childhood complexes coming back to life, and beliefs that humanity surmounted, about the dead or the power of wishes, that suddenly seem confirmed.

  • repetition
  • coincidence
  • animism
  • superstition
  • death
  • narcissism
  • castration anxiety
  • childhood
  • fear

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The Uncanny in Stories

Why does a fairy tale's resurrection leave us calm while a ghost story chills us? The essay's last part asks what fiction can add to, or remove from, the uncanny.

Much that would be uncanny in life is not uncanny in fiction. Fairy tales announce a world where wishes come true, so the dead may wake without a shudder. A writer who seems to stay in ordinary reality, though, can use everything life offers and more, heightening the effect or turning it to comedy. Freud admits that some fears, of silence, darkness and solitude, he can only call infantile, and that the fantasy of being buried alive disguises a far older and once pleasant one.

  • fiction
  • literature
  • narrative
  • fairy tales
  • aesthetics
  • reality
  • madness

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Within this work

passages held
74
distinct concepts
100
by passages held, corpus-wide
#569

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “fear” and “uncanny”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 19 pairings. 81 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
fearuncanny11
repressionuncanny11
aestheticsuncanny9
animismuncanny8
fictionuncanny8
secrecysemantics8
semanticsuncanny6
secrecyuncanny4
aestheticsfear3
animismfear3
aestheticsfiction2
aestheticsrepression2
animismrepression2
fearsemantics2
fictionrepression2
aestheticsanimism1
animismfiction1
fearfiction1
fearsecrecy1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1900 The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung)

    Begun from his own dreams in the 1890s and enlarged in edition after edition, this is where Freud sets out the method of interpretation that his later books apply to slips of the tongue, jokes and myths.

     DE
  2. 1901 The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens)

    The dream book's method carried into waking life; its slips and forgettings became the opening part of the lectures Freud later gave to beginners in Vienna.

     DE
  3. 1905 Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten)

    Freud's only book-length study of comedy, and the one most built from borrowed material: puns, anecdotes and Jewish jokes, each taken apart in turn.

     DE
  4. 1907 Frühe Schriften zu Religion und Dichtung

    Two early excursions from the clinic, gathered here in one volume: the seed of Freud's later books on religion, and his short account of where a writer's stories come from.

     DE
  5. 1910 Zur Theorie des Unbewußten

    Four theoretical papers written between 1910 and 1915 and gathered here in one volume, on the road from the dream book to the metapsychological essays of 1915 — the last of the four is one of those essays.

     DE
  6. 1913 Spätere Schriften zu Dichtung und Mythos

    Two essays from 1913 and 1917, gathered here in one volume, that show Freud the reader of Shakespeare and Goethe: the dream-book method applied to a stage motif and to the first page of a famous autobiography.

     DE
  7. 1913 Totem and Taboo (Totem und Tabu)

    The first of Freud's books on society and religion, where he moves from the patient to the human species; Group Psychology, The Future of an Illusion and his last book, on Moses, all build on its story of the murdered father.

     DE
  8. 1914 On Narcissism: An Introduction (Zur Einführung des Narzißmus)

    A short essay written as Jung was breaking with Freud, and the hinge between his early theory of the drives and the later picture of ego and super-ego.

     DE
  9. 1915 Instincts and their Vicissitudes (Triebe und Triebschicksale)

    The paper that opens Freud's 1915 theoretical series by defining its basic term; the companion essays on repression and on the unconscious build on it.

     DE
  10. 1915 Schriften aus dem Weltkrieg

    Freud's direct responses to the First World War, gathered in one volume on this site: a long essay of 1915 on disillusionment and death, and a short one of 1916 on transience and mourning.

     DE
  11. 1915 The Unconscious (Das Unbewußte)

    Freud's fullest account of what he meant by the unconscious, written in wartime Vienna eight years before The Ego and the Id redrew his map of the mind.

     DE
  12. 1917 Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse)

    Freud's own introduction to his work, and the closest thing he wrote to a textbook: his books on dreams and on everyday slips retold for listeners, then carried on into a general theory of neurosis.

     DE
  13. 1919 The 'Uncanny' (Das Unheimliche) you are here DE
  14. 1920 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Jenseits des Lustprinzips)

    The hinge of Freud's later work: the 1920 book that introduces the death drive, followed within three years by the new map of the mind in The Ego and the Id.

     DE
  15. 1921 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse)

    The bridge between Freud's speculations on prehistory and his new model of the mind: its chapter on a "grade in the ego" sets out the ego ideal that The Ego and the Id would rename two years later.

     DE
  16. 1923 The Ego and the Id (Das Ich und das Es)

    The book in which Freud's later model of the mind takes its final shape; the essays and books that follow it, on anxiety, religion and civilisation, all speak its language of ego, id and super-ego.

     DE
  17. 1924 Späte Schriften zur Ich-Psychologie

    Three short papers of the mid-1920s, gathered here in one volume, in which Freud tests the model of The Ego and the Id on psychosis, on memory and on laughter.

     DE
  18. 1926 Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (Hemmung, Symptom und Angst)

    Written three years after The Ego and the Id, it rebuilds the theory of neurotic symptoms in that book's terms, starting from the difference between a symptom and an inhibition, a restriction the ego places on itself.

     DE
  19. 1927 The Future of an Illusion (Die Zukunft einer Illusion)

    Freud's most direct case against religion, written fourteen years after Totem and Taboo had traced it to the murdered father, and the opening of the late cultural writings that continue in Civilization and Its Discontents.

     DE
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