What is the uncanny? What makes something uncanny? We tend to describe things that are out of place or beyond the ordinary as uncanny, whether it’s an athlete’s skill or a sound we hear that we cannot identify its source.
Sigmund Freud asked the same thing in his 1919 essay “The Uncanny.” The piece is an important transition from his earlier approach that focused on the satisfaction of desires and needs to his later turn to the death drive. Freud begins the essay acknowledging that it might seem strange that a psychoanalyst would examine what seems more a matter of aesthetics. But because art trades in “strata of the psyche” that aesthetics often overlooks, it becomes necessary at times to take such an interest. The uncanny is just such an instance, ripe for analysis.
“There is no doubt that this belongs to the realm of the frightening, of what evokes fear and dread,” Freud observes. But what is it that distinguishes the uncanny from what is merely frightening? A dangerous wild animal is frightening, but not uncanny. A death in the family isn’t uncanny, but on the anniversary of a sudden and tragic previous one it becomes so.
The word translated “uncanny” is the German unheimlich, which very literally could be rendered “unhomely.” This is important, as it carries a resonance that is more than simple eeriness: it conveys a sense of something distorting or corrupting the symbols and norms that should make this place a home. Tracing the definition of heimlich across time, Freud notes that it is a word whose meaning “develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich.”
How can something both feel like home and not like home? The uncanny names the liminality in which the known suddenly turns into its opposite. The uncanny is the traversal of a thing from the pole of the everyday to the pole of the unusual and unnerving. That eerie quality stems from the thing’s escaping your ordinary conceptual grasp to convey what seems to be its opposite. The uncanny plays against our inborn desire for a safe sense of belonging here when sights and sounds and smells we recognize and associate with normality become Other.
The uncanny is something familiar but out of place. In this unexpected place, its familiarity takes on a different valence and becomes uncomfortably unfamiliar. What should be reassuring or at least unremarkable becomes ominous when it’s set here, in this way, where or when it doesn’t belong.
This dialectical double sense is why it isn’t enough to say a double is good or bad, for instance. It could be an assurance that a loved one has survived death, for instance, and therefore good. But to see your own double, your doppelganger, is usually taken across time and cultures as an “uncanny harbinger of death.” Or, to twist the first example, your mother sitting in a chair in your bedroom may bring you comfort as a child, but it becomes uncanny when you are an adult and she has been dead for years.
In his attempt to “translate” himself into this state of feeling, Freud recalls an incident when he was traveling by train. A sudden jolt swung back the door of an adjoining washroom and an elderly man with an appearance Freud found distasteful entered his compartment. Freud rose to guide the man back to his own compartment but discovered that the man was actually him: the mistaken intruder was his own reflection in a mirror. “Is it not possible, though,” he writes, that his dislike of this man’s appearance “was a vestigial trace of the archaic reaction which feels the ‘double’ to be something uncanny?”
This episode shows how the familiar contains seeds of the weird that at times shock us out of our complacent non-engagement with the world. The uncanny shows itself when and where the symbolic order breaks down and the real becomes visible, that is, where language and concepts prove themselves inadequate for maintaining the illusion of control. When we suddenly realize, “Yuck, that haggard old man is me!” Or with terror, “That’s not just a dog” (it’s a bear), or “That’s not just a thunderstorm” (it’s a hurricane). The “just” in each of these phrases usually permits us, we feel, to write off the otherness and the threat of the things we become aware of. The uncanny unnerves us because it shows us that reality cannot be mastered and that our belief that we had mastered it was a fiction.
Freud shows here, though, why one cannot psychoanalyze themselves. Controlling the interpretation of our words and behaviors and hedging the counter-evidence only cements our self-deception. In standard psychoanalytic fashion, he interprets the uncanny as having more to do with the subject than with any object of perception. Uncanny experiences are reduced to the return of repressed infantile complexes or to the survival of primitive beliefs that have been, he asserts, “surmounted” in modernity. Indeed, he claims that the former explains the latter: “Primitive beliefs are most intimately connected with infantile complexes, and are, in fact, based on them.”
That the mind takes such phenomena seriously in the moment they are experienced need not worry us. The unconscious plays by its own rules and is not subject to “reality-testing,” he says. But he loads the dice in doing so, as “reality-testing,” for him, will always verify that there’s no ghost in the corner, don’t be ridiculous. We all know that isn’t real. “Reality-testing” has less to do with either reality or testing and more to do with motivated reasoning and the “need” for things to be so. (Which elsewhere he identifies as infantile. But I digress!)
At his first opportunity, Freud shuts down the possibility of what the uncanny suggests on its face. He exerts all of his intellectual prowess to master this unsettling idea and bring it under the control of his outlook and commitments. He knows that the uncanny disturbs these things and that if it is allowed on its own terms, then the crack in his screen will continue growing until it threatens the entire edifice of his world. He is repressing the fact that these “primitive” beliefs have never really been surmounted. The uncanny is the repressed returning, just as he insists it does, but here and now it is something he needs to neutralize.
We can tell this because he is troubled (and he admits it) by the fact that most uncanny experiences he has heard about are not easily explained as disturbances of psychic states, as in his own encounter with his reflection. Though he tries to contain the threat they pose by qualifying how they only seem to suggest that the dead return or that a person can manipulate reality with their thoughts alone, it is clear the person he is most trying to persuade is himself. He needs the uncanny to be the persistence of the spectral in the human unconscious and nothing more. But he senses that it is less a relic than an artifact, such as those in the stories of M. R. James, that ignores the era’s pretensions of superiority and ports the supposedly dead past into the present.
But we mustn’t lose sight of how the uncanny comes “to coincide with its opposite” or else we will remain complacent, assuring ourselves the problem is this thing and not us. What frightens us most about the Other is that it is not wholly Other: it is proximate to us; we are in it, and it is in us.
Freud was displeased with the visage he discovered, to his chagrin, was his own. We likewise respond with disgust to that figure in fiction or in real-world politics who most reflects what is base and loathsome within us.
It is this Otherness that is not wholly Other that draws Freud to this analysis quite in spite of his prejudices. The death drive is at work in this very essay: the thing that disturbs and frightens him nevertheless fascinates him, compels him to take up this theme from which he tries to distance himself right at the start and which he attempts to theoretically explain away with supercilious boasts of having surpassed “infantile complexes.”
“Not wholly Other” is the true dialectical counterpart to the Other, but putting it this way also uncannily evokes the young Karl Barth’s ascription of God as the Wholly Other in his Romans commentary. The uncanny burns through the net of symbolic control and discloses something of reality, but does that include God? In some instances at least, yes, and precisely because of this Otherness-within-not-Otherness that is disclosed in Jesus Christ.
The uncanny shows itself in Ezekiel’s first vision (Ezek 1:1–28). Among the exiles by the Kebar River, Ezekiel was given to see strange things revealed by God. He sees four living creatures that combine aspects of human beings, lions, oxen, and eagles, with four faces and four wings. Besides these creatures are wheels-within-wheels, “full of eyes all around.” Over the creature’s head is something like a crystal vault, above which was something like a throne of lapis lazuli, and on it was one like a son of man.
This climax may seem underwhelming to us moderns, who focus our attention on the strange creatures and the wheels that accompany them. But Ezekiel falls on his face upon seeing this one “like a man” seated where he knows God should be enthroned. His astonishment is at the appearance of YHWH like a man. This isn’t to say that the other things Ezekiel witnesses are perfectly normal. But the crown of this uncanny revelation is the familiar sight of a man made so overwhelmingly, disorientingly unfamiliar as he sits upon the throne of the God who is not to be imaged.
The incarnation is thus immensely uncanny. This shows itself powerfully in the fear the disciples feel when Jesus calms the storm. They were afraid during the storm, to be sure, but they were terrified when he rebuked the wind and waves. “Who is this?” they asked themselves (Mk 4:41); “What sort of man is this, that even winds and sea obey him?” (Mt 8:27). The one they knew was much, much more than they knew, far beyond their ken, and thus their love and devotion was mingled with sublime fear.
The cross of Jesus’ crucifixion is itself an uncanny object. It is meant to convey horror and dread to all who behold it, but in the uncanny wisdom of God it is the instrument of humanity’s deliverance from sin and death. Ultimately, however, the greatest instance of the uncanny is on the other side of the cross, in the unjustly executed Jesus who, despite having been killed, is alive, appearing to his disciples still bearing the wounds of his execution. The Roman world’s symbolic order could not contain or constrain the life, death, and resurrection of the Son of God; its very attempt to do so only served his purposes. Our salvation is uncanny, thanks be to God.
Freud’s compulsive need to examine the uncanny and even his defensive swerves away from its implications yield important insights into both the human psyche and the nature of our world. The uncanny bears witness to a weird depth dimension to it and our being that, modern pretensions of superiority notwithstanding, cannot be overcome. It hints with its potent strangeness at how we both belong in this world and how we do not belong here at all. It puts into sharp relief the estrangement between us and our world and even between us and ourselves.
It cannot be otherwise when we are fallen beings who can only speculate what original uprightness was like, who can only imagine what unalienated existence was like. The non-memory haunts us, and every haunted thing contains within it a trace of this division. The uncanny can shock us out of arrogant indifference if we will permit it to, if we have eyes to see that the specter haunting us reflects ourselves back at us.
Excellent work!