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The literature of the uncanny offers an excellent area in which to look at the appropriateness of psychoanalytic theory to the study of literature. An apparently supernatural event - in literature or life - may simply result from a psychological disorder in the perceiver. The uncanny also has a special literary status, because studies of the psy-
The “Uncanny”1. (1919) SIGMUND FREUD. It is only rarely that a psychoanalyst feels impelled to in-vestigate 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.
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The ‘Uncanny’. It is only rarely that a psycho-analyst 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.
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Sigmund Freud takes up this question in a 1919 essay “The Uncanny,” and his thoughts on the subject are still useful 100 years later. In this lesson, I want to sketch out his definition of this special kind of fear and then show you how you might apply it to your own readings of literature.
-- "Uncanny," p. 195: Freud's definition = uncanny as the class of frightening things that leads us back to what is known and familiar. -- Freud's aim: to demonstrate psychoanalytically why this is the case.
Uncanny': the heimlich which turns so unnervingly into its opposite, and already contains that opposite within its too-familiar self is, by definition, intimate, friendly and comfortable, tame and belonging
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It invites relevant contributions across a wide range of intellectual disciplines on issues and writers belonging to or engaging the work of deconstructive thinking (such as Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot, Levinas, Irigaray, and others).
