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- The uncanny is the psychological experience of an event or thing that is unsettling in a way that feels oddly familiar, rather than simply mysterious. [ 1] This phenomenon is used to describe incidents where a familiar entity is encountered in a frightening, eerie, or taboo context. [ 2][ 3]
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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.
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What is the uncanny?
What does 'uncanny' mean in psychoanalytic theory?
Apr 17, 2019 · Typically, Freud’s theory of the uncanny is referred to under the heading of “the return of the repressed.” But Freud also offered another, more often overlooked, explanation for why we experience certain phenomena as uncanny.
The uncanny arises as the recurrence of something long forgotten and repressed, something superceded in our psychic life = a reminder of our psychic past. IV. The Uncanny in Literature, in Narrative Fiction. A. Freud is not entirely satisfied with his own conclusion. Not everything that returns from repression is uncanny.
In 1919 the frisson of the uncanny in both life and literature invited Freud to think through the question of repetition as a form of thought-experiment in the alternative context of the aesthetic.
Uncanniness was first explored psychologically by Ernst Jentsch in a 1906 essay, On the Psychology of the Uncanny. Jentsch defines the Uncanny as: being a product of "...intellectual uncertainty; so that the uncanny would always, as it were, be something one does not know one’s way about in.
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-
In Tzvetan Todorov's theory of the fantastic, the uncanny is an effect produced by stories in which the incredible events can be explained as the products of the narrator's or protagonist's dream, hallucination, or delusion.
