The “Uncanny”
by Sigmund Freud
from http://people.emich.edu/acoykenda/uncanny1.htm
I
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. He works in other
strata of mental life and has little to do with the subdued emotional impulses
which, inhibited in their aims and dependent on a host of concurrent factors,
usually furnish the material for the study of aesthetics. But it does
occasionally happen that he has to interest himself in some particular province
of that subject; and this province usually proves to be a rather remote one, and
one which has been neglected in the specialist literature of aesthetics.
The subject of the ‘uncanny’ is a province of this kind. It is undoubtedly
related to what is frightening — to what arouses dread and horror; equally
certainly, too, the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so
that it tends to coincide with what excites fear in general.
Yet we may expect that a special core of feeling is present which justifies the
use of a special conceptual term. One is
curious to know what this common core is which allows us to distinguish as
‘uncanny’; certain things which lie within the field of what is frightening.
…
In his study of the ‘uncanny,’ Jentsch quite rightly lays stress on the obstacle
presented by the fact that people vary so very greatly in their sensitivity to
this quality of feeling. The writer
of the present contribution, indeed, must himself plead guilty to a special
obtuseness in the matter, where extreme delicacy of perception would be more in
place. It is long since he has
experienced or heard of anything which has given him an uncanny impression, and
he must start by translating himself into that state of feeling, by awakening in
himself the possibility of experiencing it. Still, such difficulties make
themselves powerfully felt in many other branches of aesthetics; we need not on
that account despair of finding instances in which the quality in question will
be unhesitatingly recognized by most people.
Two courses are open to us at the outset. Either we can find out what meaning
has come to be attached to the word ‘uncanny’ in the course of its history; or
we can collect all those properties of persons, things, sense-impressions,
experiences and situations which arouse in us the feeling of uncanniness, and
then infer the unknown nature of the uncanny from what all these examples have
in common. I will say at once that both courses lead to the same result:
the uncanny is that class of the
frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar. How this
is possible, in what circumstances the familiar can become uncanny and
frightening, I shall show in what follows. Let me also add that my
investigation was actually begun by collecting a number of individual cases, and
was only later confirmed by an examination of linguistic usage. In this
discussion, however, I shall follow the reverse course.
The German word ‘unheimlich’ is obviously the opposite of ‘heimlich’
[‘homely’], … the opposite of what is familiar; and we are tempted to
conclude that what is ‘uncanny’ is frightening precisely because it is not
known and familiar.
Naturally not everything that is new and unfamiliar is frightening, however; the
relation is not capable of inversion. …
Something has to be added to what is novel and unfamiliar in order to make it
uncanny.
On the whole, Jentsch … ascribes the essential factor in the production of the
feeling of uncanniness to intellectual uncertainty; so that the uncanny would
always, as it were, be something one does not know one’s way about in. The
better orientated in his environment a person is, the less readily will he get
the impression of something uncanny in regard to the objects and events in it.
It is not difficult to see that this definition is incomplete,
and we will therefore try to proceed
beyond the equation ‘uncanny’ as ‘unfamiliar.’ We will first turn to other
languages. But the dictionaries that we consult tell us nothing new, perhaps
only because we ourselves speak a language that is foreign. Indeed, we get an
impression that many languages are without a word for this particular shade of
what is frightening. …
Latin:
… An uncanny place: locus suspectus; at an uncanny time of night. …
Greek:
… Eeros (i.e., strange, foreign).
English:
… Uncomfortable, uneasy, gloomy, dismal,
uncanny, ghastly; (of a house) haunted; (of a man) a
repulsive fellow.
French:
… Inquiétant, sinistre, lugubre, mal à son aise.
[Disquieting, sinister, lugubrious,
uneasy, translations JHR]
Spanish:
… Sospechoso, de mal agüero, lúgubre, siniestro. …[suspicious,
lugubrious, sinister]
In Arabic and Hebrew ‘uncanny’ means the same as
‘daemonic,’ ‘gruesome.’
Let us therefore return to the German language. In Daniel Sanders’s
Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache (1860, 1, 729), the[re] is following entry…
under the word ‘heimlich.’
“Heimlich, adj., …
… Note especially the negative ‘un-’: eerie,
weird, arousing gruesome fear: ‘Seeming quite unheimlich and ghostly
to him.’ ‘The unheimlich, fearful hours of night.’ ‘I had already
long since felt an unheimich,’ even gruesome feeling.’ ‘Now I am
beginning to have an unheimlich feeling.’ … ‘Feels an unheimlich
horror.’ ‘Unheimlich and motionless like a stone image.’ ‘The
unheimlich mist called hill-fog.’ ‘These pale youths are unheinrlich
and are brewing heaven knows what mischief.’ ‘Unheimlich
is the name for everything that ought to have remained ... secret and hidden but
has come to light’ (Schelling).— ‘To veil the divine, to surround
it with a certain Unheimlichkeit.’ …”
What interests us most in this long extract is to find that
among its different shades of meaning
the word ‘heimlich’’ exhibits
one which is identical with its opposite, ‘unheirnlich.’ What
is heimlich thus comes to be unheimlich. (Cf. the quotation from
Gutzkow: ‘We call it “unheimlich”; you call it “heimlich.”’)
In general we are reminded that the word
‘heimlich’ is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which,
without being contradictory, are yet very different: on the one hand it means
what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other. what is concealed and kept out
of sight. ‘Unheimlich’ is
customarily used, we are told, as the contrary only of the first signification
of’ heimlich,’ and not of the second. Sanders tells us nothing
concerning a possible genetic connection between these two meanings of
heimlich. On the other hand, we notice that
Schelling says something which throws
quite a new light on the concept of the Unheimlich, for which we were
certainly not prepared. According to him, everything is unheimlich that
ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light. …
Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which
develops in the direction of ambivalence,
until it finally coincides with its
opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a
sub-species of heimlich. Let us bear this discovery in mind, though we
cannot yet rightly understand it, alongside of Schelling’s definition of the
Unheimlich. If we go on to examine individual instances of uncanniness,
these hints will become intelligible to us.
II
When we proceed to review things, persons, impressions, events and situations
which are able to arouse in us a feeling of the uncanny in a particularly
forcible and definite form, the first requirement is obviously to select a
suitable example to start on. Jentsch
has taken as a very good instance ‘doubts whether an apparently animate being is
really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact
animate’; and he refers in this connection to the impression made by waxwork
figures, ingeniously constructed dolls and automata. To these he adds the
uncanny effect of epileptic fits, and of manifestations of insanity, because
these excite in the spectator the impression of automatic, mechanical processes
at work behind the ‘ordinary appearance of mental activity. Without entirely
accepting this author’s view, we will take it as a starting point for our own
investigation because in what follows he reminds us of a writer who has
succeeded in producing uncanny effects better than anyone else.
Jentsch writes: ‘In telling a story one of the most successful devices for
easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a
particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton and to do it in
such a way that his attention is not focused directly upon his uncertainty, so
that he may not be led to go into the matter and clear it up immediately. That,
as we have said, would quickly dissipate the peculiar emotional effect of the
thing. E. T. A. Hoffmann has repeatedly employed this psychological artifice
with success in his fantastic narratives.’
This observation, undoubtedly a correct one, refers primarily to the story of
The Sand-Man” in Hoffmann’s Nachtstücken, which contains the original of
Olympia, the doll that appears in the first act of Offenbach’s opera, Tales
of Hoffmann, but I cannot think — and I hope most readers of the story will
agree with me — that the theme of the doll Olympia, who is to all appearances a
living being, is by any means the only, or indeed the most important, element
that must be held responsible for the quite unparalleled atmosphere of
uncanniness evoked by the story. Nor is this atmosphere heightened by the
fact that the author himself treats the episode of Olympia with a faint touch of
satire and uses it to poke fun at the young man’s idealization of his mistress.
The main theme of the story is, on the contrary, something different,
something which gives it its name, and which is always re-introduced at critical
moments: it is the theme of the ‘Sand-Man’ who tears out children’s eyes.
This fantastic tale opens with the childhood recollections of the student
Nathaniel. In spite of his present happiness, he cannot banish the memories
associated with the mysterious and terrifying death of his beloved father. On
certain evenings his mother used to send the children to bed early, warning them
that ‘the Sand-Man was coming’; and, sure enough, Nathaniel would not fail to
hear the heavy tread of a visitor, with whom his father would then be occupied
for the evening. When questioned about the Sand-Man, his mother, it is true,
denied that such a person existed except as a figure of speech; but his nurse
could give him more definite information: ‘He’s a wicked man who comes when
children won’t go to bed, and throws handfuls of sand in their eyes so that they
jump out of their heads all bleeding. Then he puts the eyes in a sack and
carries them off to the half-moon to feed his children. They sit up there in
their nest, and their beaks are hooked like owls’ beaks, and they use them to
peck up naughty boys’ and girls’ eyes with.’
Although little Nathaniel was sensible and old enough not to credit the figure
of the Sand-Man with such gruesome attributes, yet the dread of him became fixed
in his heart. He determined to find out what the Sand-Man looked like; and one
evening, when the Sand-Man was expected again, he hid in his father’s study. He
recognized the visitor as the lawyer Coppelius, a repulsive person whom the
children were frightened of when he occasionally came to a meal; and he now
identified this Coppelius with the dreaded Sand-Man. As regards the rest of the
scene, Hoffmann already leaves us in doubt whether what we are witnessing is tee
first delirium of the panic-stricken boy, or a succession of events which are to
be regarded in the story as being real. His father and the guest are at work at
a brazier with glowing flames. The
little eavesdropper hears Coppelius call out: ‘Eyes here! Eyes here!’ and
betrays himself by screaming aloud. Coppelius seizes him and is on the point of
dropping bits of red-hot coal from the fire into his eyes, and then of throwing
them into the brazier, but his father begs him off and saves his eyes. After
this the boy falls into a deep swoon; and a long illness brings his experience
to an end. Those who decide in favour of the rationalistic interpretation of the
Sand-Man will not fail to recognize in the child’s phantasy the persisting
influence of his nurse’s story. The bits of sand that are to be thrown into the
child’s eyes turn into bits of red-hot coal from the flames; and in both cases
they are intended to make his eyes jump out. In the course of another visit
of the Sand-Man’s, a year later, his father is killed in his study by an
explosion. The lawyer Coppelius disappears from the place without leaving a
trace behind.
Nathaniel, now a student, believes that he has recognized this phantom of horror
from his childhood in an itinerant optician, an Italian called Giuseppe Coppola,
who at his university town, offers him weather-glasses [“barometers,” JHR] for
sale. When Nathaniel refuses, the man goes on: ‘Not weather-glasses? not
weather-glasses? also got fine eyes, fine eyes!’ The student’s terror is allayed
when he finds that the proffered eyes are only harmless spectacles, and he buys
a pocket spy-glass from Coppola. With its aid he looks across into Professor
Spalanzani’s house opposite and there spies Spalanzani’s beautiful, but
strangely silent and motionless daughter, Olympia. He soon falls in love with
her so violently that, because of her, he quite forgets the clever and sensible
girl to whom he is betrothed. But
Olympia is an automaton whose clock-work has been made by Spalanzani, and whose
eyes have been put in by Coppola, the Sand-Man. The student surprises the two
Masters quarrelling over their handiwork. The optician carries off the wooden
eyeless doll; and the mechanician, Spalanzani, picks up Olympia’s bleeding eyes
from the ground and throws them at Nathaniel’s breast, saying that Coppola had
stolen them from the student.
Nathaniel succumbs to a fresh attack of madness, and in his delirium his
recollection of his father’s death is mingled with this new experience. ‘Hurry
up! hurry up! ring of fire!’ he cries. ‘Spin about, ring of fire — Hurrah! Hurry
up, wooden doll! lovely wooden doll, spin about — .’ He then falls upon the
professor, Olympia’s ‘father,’ and tries to strangle him.
Rallying from a long and serious illness, Nathaniel seems at last to have
recovered. He intends to marry his betrothed, with whom he has become
reconciled. One day he and she are walking through the city market-place, over
which the high tower of the Town Hall throws its huge shadow. On the girl’s
suggestion, they climb the tower, leaving her brother, who is walking with them,
down below. From the top, Clara’s attention is drawn to a curious object moving
along the street. Nathaniel looks at this thing through Coppola’s spy-glass,
which he finds in his pocket, and falls into a new attack of madness. Shouting
‘Spin about, wooden doll!’ he tries to throw the girl into the gulf below. Her
brother, brought to her side by her cries, rescues her and hastens down with her
to safety. On the tower above, the
madman rushes round, shrieking ‘Ring of fire, spin about!’ — and we know the
origin of the words. Among the people who begin to gather below there comes
forward the figure of the lawyer Coppelius, who has suddenly returned. We may
suppose that it was his approach, seen through the spy-glass, which threw
Nathaniel into his fit of madness. As the onlookers prepare to go up and
overpower the madman, Coppelius laughs and says: ‘Wait
a bit; he’ll come down of himself.’ Nathaniel suddenly stands still, catches
sight of Coppelius, and with a wild shriek ‘Yes! “fine eyes — fine eyes”!’
flings himself over the parapet. While he lies on the paving-stones with a
shattered skull the Sand-Man vanishes in the throng.
This short summary leaves no doubt, I think, that the feeling of something
uncanny is directly attached to the figure of the Sand-Man,
that is, to the idea of being robbed of
one’s eyes, and that Jentsch’s point of an intellectual uncertainty has nothing
to do with the effect. Uncertainty whether an object is living or inanimate,
which admittedly applied to the doll
There is no question therefore, of any
intellectual uncertainty here: we know now that we are not supposed to be
looking on at the products of a madman’s imagination, behind which we, with the
superiority of rational minds, are able to detect the sober truth; and yet this
knowledge does not lessen the impression of uncanniness in the least degree.
The theory of intellectual uncertainty is thus incapable of explaining that
impression.
We know from psycho-analytic experience, however, that the fear of damaging or
losing one’s eyes is a terrible one in children.
Many adults retain their
apprehensiveness in this respect, and no physical injury is so much dreaded
by them as an injury to the eye. We are accustomed to say, too, that we will
treasure a thing as the apple of our eye. A study of dreams, phantasies and
myths has taught us that anxiety about one’s eyes, the fear of going blind, is
often enough a substitute for the dread of being castrated.
The self-blinding of the mythical criminal, Oedipus, was simply a mitigated form
of the punishment of castration — the only punishment that was adequate for him
by the lex talionis. We may try on rationalistic grounds to
deny that fears about the eye are derived from the fear of castration, and
may argue that it is very natural that so precious an organ as the eye should be
guarded by a proportionate dread. Indeed, we might go further and say that the
fear of castration itself contains no other significance and no deeper secret
than a justifiable dread of this rational kind.
But this view does not account
adequately for the substitutive relation between the eye and the male organ
which is seen to exist in dreams and myths and phantasies; nor can it dispel the
impression that the threat of being castrated in especial excites a peculiarly
violent and obscure emotion, and that this emotion is what first gives the idea
of losing other organs its intense colouring. All further doubts are removed
when we learn the details of their ‘castration complex’ from the analysis of
neurotic patients, and realize its immense importance in their mental life.
Moreover, I would not recommend any opponent of the psycho-analytic view to
select this particular story of the Sand-Man with which to support his argument
that anxiety about the eyes has nothing to do with the castration complex.
For why does Hoffmann bring the anxiety
about eyes into such intimate connection with the father’s death? And why does
the Sand-Man always appear as a disturber of love?
** He
separates the unfortunate Nathaniel from his betrothed and from her brother, his
best friend; he destroys the second object of his love, Olympia, the lovely
doll; and he drives him into suicide at the moment when he has won back his
Clara and is about to be happily united to her. Elements in the story like
these, and many others, seem arbitrary and meaningless so long as we deny all
connection between fears about the eye and castration; but they become
intelligible as soon as we replace the Sand-Man by the dreaded father at whose
hands castration is expected.
**
We shall venture, therefore, to refer the uncanny effect of the Sand-Man to the
anxiety belonging to the castration complex of childhood. But having reached the
idea that we can make an infantile factor such as this responsible for feelings
of uncanniness, we are encouraged to see whether we can apply it to other
instances of the uncanny. We find in the story of the Sand-Man the other theme
on which Jentsch lays stress, of a doll which appears to be alive.
Jentsch believes that a particularly favourable condition for awakening uncanny
feelings is created when there is intellectual uncertainty whether an object is
alive or not, and when an inanimate object becomes too much like an animate one.
Now, dolls are of course rather closely connected with childhood life. We
remember that in their early games children do not distinguish at all sharply
between living and inanimate objects, and that they are especially fond of
treating their dolls like live people. In fact, I have occasionally heard a
woman patient declare that even at the age of eight she had still been convinced
that her dolls would be certain to come to life if she were to look at them in a
particular, extremely concentrated, way. So that here, too, it is not difficult
to discover a factor from childhood.
But, curiously enough, while the Sand-Man story deals with the arousing of an
early childhood fear, the idea of a ‘living doll’ excites no fear at all;
children have no fear of their dolls coming to life, they may even desire it.
The source of uncanny feelings would not, therefore, be an infantile fear in
this case, but rather an infantile wish or even merely an infantile belief.
There seems to be a contradiction here; but perhaps it is only a complication,
which may be helpful to us later on.
**
For a contrary view put forth by Freud himself, compare “The
Taboo on Virginity,” in which Freud writes: “Whenever primitive man
institutes a taboo, there he fears a danger; and it cannot be disputed that the
general principle underlying all of these regulations and avoidances is a dread
of women. Perhaps the fear is founded on the difference of woman from man, on
her eternally inexplicable, mysterious, strange nature which thus seems hostile.
Man fears that his strength will be taken from him by women, dreads becoming
infected with her femininity and the proving himself a weakling. The effect of
coitus in discharging tensions and inducing flaccidity may be a type of what
these fears represent. … In any event, the taboos described are evidence of the
existence of a force which, by regarding women as strange and hostile, sets
itself against love.”
**
[Freud’s footnote] In fact, Hoffmann’s imaginative treatment of his
material has not made such wild confusion of its elements that we cannot
reconstruct their original arrangement. In the story of Nathaniel’s childhood,
the figures of his father and Coppelius represent the two opposites into which
the father-imago is split by his ambivalence; whereas the one threatens to blind
him — that is, to castrate him — , the other, the ‘good’ father, intercedes for
his sight. The part of the complex which
is most strongly repressed, the death-wish against the ‘bad’ father, finds
expression in the death of the ‘good’ father, and Coppelius is made answerable
for it. This pair of fathers is represented later, in his student days, by
Professor Spalanzani and Coppola the optician. The Professor is even called
the father of
The “Uncanny”
by Sigmund Freud
part two
Hoffmann is the unrivalled master of the uncanny in literature. His novel,
Die Elixire des Teufels [The Devil’s Elixir], contains a whole mass of
themes to which one is tempted to ascribe the uncanny effect of the narrative;
but it is too obscure and intricate a story for us to venture upon a summary of
it. Towards the end of the book the reader is told the facts, hitherto concealed
from him, from which the action springs; with the result, not that he is at last
enlightened, but that he falls into a state of complete bewilderment. The author
has piled up too much material of the same kind. In consequence one’s grasp of
the story as a whole suffers, though not the impression it makes.
We must content ourselves with selecting
those themes of uncanniness which are most prominent, and with seeing whether
they too can fairly be traced back to infantile sources. These themes are all
concerned with the phenomenon of the ‘double,’ which appears in every shape and
in every degree of development. Thus we have characters who are to be considered
identical because they look alike. This relation is accentuated by mental
processes leaping from one of these characters to another — by what we should
call telepathy —, so that the one
possesses knowledge, feelings and experience in common with the other. Or it is
marked by the fact that the subject identifies himself with someone else, so
that he is in doubt as to which his self is, or substitutes the extraneous self
for his own. In other words, there is a doubling, dividing and interchanging
of the self. And finally there is the constant recurrence of the same thing —
the repetition of the same features or character-traits or vicissitudes, of the
same crimes, or even the same names through several consecutive generations.
The
theme of the ‘double’ has been very thoroughly treated by Otto Rank (1914).
He has gone into the connections which the ‘double’ has with reflections in
mirrors, with shadows, with guardian spirits, with the belief in the soul and
with the fear of death; but he also lets in a flood of light on the surprising
evolution of the idea. For the ‘double’ was originally an insurance against the
destruction of the ego, an ‘energetic denial of the power of death,’ as Rank
says; and probably the ‘immortal’ soul was the first ‘double’ of the body.
This invention of doubling as a
preservation against extinction has its counterpart in the language of dreams,
which is found of representing castration by a doubling or multiplication of a
genital symbol. The same desire led the Ancient Egyptians to develop the art of
making images of the dead in lasting materials.
Such ideas, however, have sprung from
the soil of unbounded self-love, from the primary narcissism which dominates the
mind of the child and of primitive man. But when this stage has been surmounted,
the ‘double’ reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality,
it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death.
The
idea of the ‘double’ does not necessarily disappear with the passing of primary
narcissism, for it can receive fresh meaning from the later stages of the ego’s
development. A special agency is slowly
formed there, which is able to stand over against the rest of the ego, which has
the function of observing and criticizing the self and of exercising a
censorship within the mind, and which we become aware of as our ‘conscience.’
In the pathological case of delusions of being watched, this mental agency
becomes isolated, dissociated from the ego, and discernible to the physician’s
eye. The fact that an agency of this kind exists, which is able to treat the
rest of the ego like an object — the
fact, that is, that man is capable of self-observation — renders it possible to
invest the old idea of a ‘double’ with a new meaning and to ascribe a number of
things to it — above all, those things which seem to self-criticism to belong to
the old surmounted narcissism of earliest times.
But it
is not only this latter material, offensive as it is to the criticism of the
ego, which may be incorporated in the idea of a double.
There are also all the unfulfilled but
possible futures to which we still like to cling in phantasy, all the strivings
of the ego which adverse external circumstances have crushed, and all our
suppressed acts of volition which nourish in us the illusion of Free Will.
[Cf. Freud, 1901b, Chapter XII (B).]
But
after having thus considered the manifest motivation of the figure of a
‘double,’ we have to admit that none of this helps us to understand the
extraordinarily strong feeling of something uncanny that pervades the
conception; and our knowledge of pathological mental processes enables us to add
that nothing in this more superficial
material could account for the urge towards defence which has caused the ego to
project that material outward as something foreign to itself. When all is said
and done, the quality of uncanniness can only come from the fact of the ‘double’
being a creation dating back to a very early mental stage, long since surmounted
— a stage, incidentally, at which it wore a more friendly aspect.
The ‘double’ has become a thing of
terror, just as, after the collapse of their religion, the gods turned into
demons.
The
other forms of ego-disturbance exploited by Hoffmann can easily be estimated
along the same lines as the theme of the ‘double.’ They are a harking-back to
particular phases in the evolution of the self-regarding feeling,
a regression to a time when the ego had
not yet marked itself off sharply from the external world and from other people.
I believe that these factors are partly responsible for the impression of
uncanniness, although it is not easy to isolate and determine exactly their
share of it.
The
factor of the repetition of the same
thing will perhaps not appeal to
everyone as a source of uncanny feeling.
From what I have observed, this phenomenon does undoubtedly, subject to certain
conditions and combined with certain circumstances, arouse an uncanny feeling,
which, furthermore, recalls the sense of helplessness experienced in some
dream-states. As I was walking, one hot summer afternoon, through the deserted
streets of a provincial town in Italy which was unknown to me, I found myself in
a quarter of whose character I could not long remain in doubt. Nothing but
painted women were to be seen at the windows of the small houses, and I hastened
to leave the narrow street at the next turning.
But after having wandered about for a time without enquiring my way, I suddenly
found myself back in the same street, where my presence was now beginning to
excite attention. I hurried away once more, only to arrive by another detour
at the same place yet a third time. Now, however, a feeling overcame me which I
can only describe as uncanny, and I was glad enough to find myself back at
the piazza I had left a short while before, without any further voyages of
discovery. Other situations which have in common with my adventure an unintended
recurrence of the same situation, but which differ radically from it in other
respects, also result in the same feeling of helplessness and of uncanniness.
So, for instance, when, caught in a mist
perhaps, one has lost one’s way in a mountain forest, every attempt to find the
marked or familiar path may bring one back again and again to one and the same
spot, which one can identify by some particular landmark. Or one may wander
about in a dark, strange room, looking for the door or the electric switch, and
collide time after time with the same piece of furniture -- though it is true
that Mark Twain succeeded by wild exaggeration in turning this latter situation
into something irresistibly comic.
If we
take another class of things, it is easy to see that there, too, it is only this
factor of involuntary repetition which surrounds what would otherwise by
innocent enough with an uncanny atmosphere, and
forces upon us the idea of something
fateful and inescapable when otherwise we should have spoken only of ‘chance.’
For instance, we naturally attach no importance to the event when we hand in an
overcoat and get a cloakroom ticket with the number, let us say, 62; or when we
find that our cabin on a ship bears that number. But the impression is altered
if two such events, each in itself indifferent, happen close together
— if we come across the number 62
several times in a single day, or if we begin to notice that everything which
has a number — addresses, hotel rooms, compartments in railway trains —
invariably has the same one, or at all events one which contains the same
figures. We do feel this to be uncanny.
And unless a man is utterly hardened and proof against the lure of superstition,
he will be tempted to ascribe a secret meaning to this obstinate recurrence of a
number; he will take it, perhaps, as an indication of the span of life allotted
to him. …
[I]t is
possible to recognize the dominance in the unconscious mind of a ‘compulsion to
repeat’
proceeding from the instinctual impulses and probably inherent in the very
nature of the instincts — a compulsion powerful enough to overrule the pleasure
principle, lending to certain aspects of
the mind their daemonic character, and still very clearly expressed in the
impulses of small children; a compulsion, too, which is responsible for a part
of the course taken by the analyses of neurotic patients. All these
considerations prepare us for the discovery that whatever reminds us of this
inner ‘compulsion to repeat’ is perceived as uncanny.
Now, however, it is time to turn from these aspects of the matter, which are in
any case difficult to judge, and look for some undeniable instances of the
uncanny, in the hope that an analysis of them will decide whether our hypothesis
is a valid one.
In the
story of “The Ring of Polycrates,’ The king of Egypt turns away in horror from
his host, Polycrates, because he sees that his friend’s every wish is at once
fulfilled, his every care promptly removed by kindly fate. His host has become
‘uncanny’ to him.
His own
explanation, that the too fortunate man has to fear the envy of the gods, seems
obscure to us; its meaning is veiled in mythological language. We will therefore
turn to another example in a less grandiose setting. In the case history of an
obsessional neurotic, I have described how the patient once stayed in a
hydropathic establishment and benefited greatly by it. He had the good sense,
however, to attribute his improvement not to the therapeutic properties of the
water, but to the situation of his room, which immediately adjoined that of a
very accommodating nurse. So on his
second visit to the establishment he asked for the same room, but was told that
it was already occupied by an old gentleman, whereupon he gave vent to his
annoyance in the words: ‘I wish he may be struck dead for it.’ A fortnight later
the old gentleman really did have a stroke. My patient thought this an ‘uncanny’
experience. The impression of uncanniness would have been stronger still if
less time had elapsed between his words and the untoward event, or if he had
been able to report innumerable similar coincidences. As a matter of fact, he
had no difficulty in producing coincidences of this sort; but then not only he
but every obsessional neurotic I have observed has been able to relate analogous
experiences. They are never surprised at their invariably running up against
someone they have just been thinking of, perhaps for the first time for a long
while. If they say one day ‘I haven’t had any news of so-and-so for a long
time,’ they will be sure to get a letter from him the next morning, and an
accident or a death will rarely take place without having passed through their
mind a little while before. They are in
the habit of referring to this state of affairs in the most modest manner,
saying that they have ‘presentiments’ which ‘usually’ come true.
One of
the most uncanny and wide-spread forms of superstition is the
dread of the evil eye, which has
been exhaustively studied by the Hamburg oculist Seligmann (1910-11).
There never seems to have been any doubt
about the source of this dread.
Whoever possesses something that is at once valuable and fragile is afraid of
other people’s envy, in so far as he projects on to them the envy he would have
felt in their place. A feeling like this betrays itself by a look even
though it is not put into words; and when a man is prominent owing to
noticeable, and particularly owing to unattractive, attributes, other people are
ready to believe that his envy is rising to a more than usual degree of
intensity and that this intensity will convert it into effective action.
What is feared is thus a secret
intention of doing harm, and certain signs are taken to mean that that intention
has the necessary power at its commend.
These
last examples of the uncanny are to be referred to the principle which I have
called ‘omnipotence of thoughts,’ taking, the name from an expression used by
one of my patients.
And now we find ourselves on familiar
ground. Our analysis of instances of the uncanny has led us back to the old,
animistic conception of the universe. This was characterized by the idea that
the world was peopled with the spirits of human beings; by the subject’s
narcissistic overvaluation of his own mental processes; by the belief in the
omnipotence of thoughts and the technique of magic based on that belief; by the
attribution to various outside persons and things of carefully graded magical
powers, or ‘mama’; as well as by all the other creations with the help of which
man, in the unrestricted narcissism of that stage of development, strove to fend
off the manifest prohibitions of reality. It seems as if each one of us has
been through a phase of individual development corresponding to this animistic
stage in primitive men, that none of us has passed through it without preserving
certain residues and traces of it which are still capable of manifesting
themselves, and that everything which now strikes us as ‘uncanny’ fulfils the
condition of touching those residues of animistic mental activity within us and
bringing them to expression.
At this
point I will put forward two considerations which, I think, contain the gist of
this short study. In the first place, if psycho-analytic theory is correct in
maintaining that every affect belonging to an emotional impulse, whatever its
kind, is transformed, if it is repressed, into anxiety, then among instances of
frightening things there must be one class in which the frightening element can
be shown to be something repressed which recurs. This class of
frightening things would then constitute the uncanny; and it must be a matter of
indifference whether what is uncanny was itself originally frightening or
whether it carried some other affect. In the second place, if this is
indeed the secret nature of the uncanny, we can understand why linguistic usage
has extended das Heimliche [‘homely’] into its opposite, das
Unheimliche (p. 226); for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien,
but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has
become alienated from it only through the process of repression. This reference
to the factor of repression enables us, furthermore, to understand Schelling’s
definition [p. 224] of the uncanny as something which ought to have remained
hidden but has come to light.
It only
remains for us to test our new hypothesis on one or two more examples of the
uncanny.
Many
people experience the feeling in the highest degree in relation to
death and dead bodies, to the return of
the dead, and to spirits and ghosts. As we have seen [p. 221] some languages
in use to-day can only render the German expression ‘an
unheimlich house’ by ‘a
haunted house.’ We might indeed have begun our investigation with this
example, perhaps the most striking of all, of something uncanny, but we
refrained from doing so because the uncanny in it is too much intermixed with
what is purely gruesome and is in part overlaid by it.
There is scarcely any other matter,
however, upon which our thoughts and feelings have changed so little since the
very earliest times, and in which discarded forms have been so completely
preserved under a thin disguise, as our relation to death. Two things account
for our conservatism: the strength of our original emotional reaction to death
and the insufficiency of our scientific knowledge about it. Biology has not
yet been able to decide whether death is the inevitable fate of every living
being or whether it is only a regular but yet perhaps avoidable event in life.
It is true that the statement ‘All men are mortal’ is paraded in text-books of
logic as an example of a general proposition; but no human being really grasps
it, and our unconscious has as little use now as it ever had for the idea of its
own mortality. Religions continue to dispute the importance of the undeniable
fact of individual death and to postulate a life after death; civil governments
still believe that they cannot maintain moral order among the living if they do
not uphold the prospect of a better life hereafter as a recompense for mundane
existence. In our great cities, placards announce lectures that undertake to
tell us how to get into touch with the souls of the departed; and it cannot be
denied that not a few of the most able and penetrating minds among our men of
science have come to the conclusion, especially towards the close of their own
lives, that a contact of this kind is not impossible.
Since almost all of us still think as
savages do on this topic, it is no matter for surprise that the primitive fear
of the dead is still so strong within us and always ready to come to the surface
on any provocation. Most likely our fear still implies the old belief that
the dead man becomes the enemy of his survivor and seeks to carry him off to
share his new life with him. Considering
our unchanged attitude towards death, we might rather enquire what has become of
the repression, which is the necessary condition of a primitive feeling
recurring in the shape of something uncanny. But repression is there, too.
All supposedly educated people have
ceased to believe officially that the dead can become visible as spirits, and
have made any such appearances dependent on improbable and remote conditions;
their emotional attitude towards their dead, moreover, once a highly ambiguous
and ambivalent one, has been toned down in the higher strata of the mind into an
unambiguous feeling of piety.
We have
now only a few remarks to add — for
animism, magic and sorcery, the omnipotence of thoughts, man’s attitude to
death, involuntary repetition and the castration complex comprise practically
all the factors which turn something frightening into something uncanny.
We can
also speak of a living person as uncanny, and we do so when we ascribe evil
intentions to him. But that is not all; in addition to this we must feel that
his intentions to harm us are going to be carried out with the help of special
powers.
A good instance of this is the ‘Gettatore,’ that uncanny figure of
Romanic superstition which Schaeffer, with intuitive poetic feeling and profound
psycho-analytic understanding, has transformed into a sympathetic character in
his Josef Montfort. But the question of these secret powers brings us
back again to the realm of animism. It was the pious Gretchen’s intuition that
Mephistopheles possessed secret powers of this kind that made him so uncanny to
her.
Sie
fühlt, daß ich ganz sicher ein Genie,
[“She
feels that surely I’m a genius now, —
Vielleicht wohl gar der Teufel bin
Perhaps the very devil
indeed!” Goethe, Faust]
The
uncanny effect of epilepsy and of madness has the same origin. The layman sees
in them the working of forces hitherto unsuspected in his fellow-men, but at the
same time he is dimly aware of them in remote corners of his own being.
The
Middle Ages quite consistently ascribed all such maladies to the influence of
demons, and in this their psychology was almost correct. Indeed, I should not be
surprised to hear that psycho-analysis, which is concerned with laying bare
these hidden forces, has itself become uncanny to many people for that very
reason. In one case, after I had succeeded — though none too rapidly — in
effecting a cure in a girl who had been an invalid for many years, I myself
heard this view expressed by the patient’s mother long after her recovery.
Dismembered
limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist,
as in a fairy tale of Hauff’s, feet
which dance by themselves, as in the book by Schaeffer which I mentioned
above — all these have something peculiarly uncanny about them, especially when,
as in the last instance, they prove capable of independent activity in addition.
As we already know, this kind of
uncanniness springs from its proximity to the castration complex. To some
people the idea of being buried alive by mistake is the most uncanny thing of
all. And yet psycho-analysis has taught us that this terrifying phantasy is only
a transformation of another phantasy which had originally nothing terrifying
about it at all, but was qualified by a certain lasciviousness — the phantasy, I
mean, of intra-uterine existence.
There
is one more point of general application which I should like to add, though,
strictly speaking, it has been included in what has already been said about
animism and modes of working of the mental apparatus that have been surmounted;
for I think it deserves special emphasis.
This is that an uncanny effect is often
and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is
effaced, as when something that we
have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a
symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes, and so on. It
is this factor which contributes not a little to the uncanny effect attaching to
magical practices. …
To
conclude this collection of examples, which is certainly not complete, I will
relate an instance taken from psycho-analytic experience; if it does not rest
upon mere coincidence, it furnishes a beautiful confirmation of our theory of
the uncanny. It often happens that neurotic men declare that they feel there is
something uncanny about the female genital organs. This unheimlich place,
however, is the entrance to the former Heim [home] of all human beings,
to the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning.
there is a joking saying that ‘Love is home-sickness’; and whenever a man dreams
of a place or a country and says to himself, while he is still dreaming: ‘this
place is familiar to me, I’ve been here before,’ we may interpret the place as
being his mother’s genitals or her body. In this case too, then, the
unheimlich is what was once heimisch, familiar; the prefix ‘un’
[‘un-’] is the token of repression.
The
“Uncanny”
by Sigmund Freud
part three
III
In the
course of this discussion the reader will have felt certain doubts arising in
his mind; and he must now have an opportunity of collecting them and bringing
them forward.
It may
be true that the uncanny [unheimlich] is something which is secretly
familiar [heimlich-heimisch], which has undergone repression and then
returned from it, and that everything that is uncanny fulfils this condition.
But the selection of material on this basis does not enable us to solve the
problem of the uncanny.
For our
proposition is clearly not convertible. Not everything that fulfils this
condition — not everything that recalls
repressed desires and surmounted modes of thinking belonging to the prehistory
of the individual and of the race — is on that account uncanny.
Nor
shall we conceal the fact that for almost every example adduced in support of
our hypothesis one may be found which rebuts it.
The story of the severed hand in Hauff’s
fairy tale [p. 244] certainly has an uncanny effect, and we have traced that
effect back to the castration complex; but most readers will probably agree with
me in judging that no trace of uncanniness is provoked by Herodotus’s story of
the treasure of Phampsinitus, in which the master-thief, whom the princess tries
to hold fast by the hand, leaves his brother’s severed hand behind with her
instead. Again, the prompt
fulfillment of the wishes of Polycrates [p. 239] undoubtedly affects us in the
same uncanny way as it did the king of Egypt;
yet our own fairy stories are crammed
with instantaneous wish-fulfillments which produce no uncanny effect whatever.
In the story of ‘The Three Wishes,’ the woman is tempted by the savoury smell of
a sausage to wish that she might have one too, and in an instant it lies on a
plate before her. In his annoyance at her hastiness her husband wishes it may
hang on her nose. And there it is, dangling from her nose. All this is very
striking but not in the least uncanny.
Fairy tales quite frankly adopt the animistic standpoint of the omnipotence of
thoughts and wishes, and yet I cannot think of any genuine fairy story which has
anything uncanny about it. We have heard that it is in the highest degree
uncanny when an inanimate object — a picture or a doll — comes to life;
nevertheless in Hans Andersen’s stories the household utensils, furniture and
tin soldiers are alive, yet nothing could well be more remote from the uncanny.
And we should hardly call it uncanny when Pygmalion’s beautiful statue comes to
life.
Apparent death and the re-animation of the dead have been represented as most
uncanny themes. But things of this sort too are very common in fairy stories.
Who would be so bold as to call it uncanny, for instance, when Snow-White opens
her eyes once more?
And the resuscitation of the dead in accounts of miracles, as in the New
Testament, elicits feelings quite unrelated to the uncanny. Then, too, the theme
that achieves such an indubitably uncanny effect, the unintended recurrence of
the same thing, serves other and quite different purposes in another class of
cases. We have already come across one example [p 237] in which it is employed
to call up a feeling of the comic; and we could multiply instances of this kind.
Or again, it works as a means of emphasis, and so on. And once more: what is the
origin of the uncanny effect of silence, darkness and solitude?
Do
not these factors point to the part played by danger in the genesis of what is
uncanny, notwithstanding that in children these same factors are the most
frequent determinants of the expression of fear [rather than of the uncanny]?
And are we after all justified in entirely ignoring intellectual uncertainty as
a factor, seeing that we have admitted its importance in relation to death [p.
242]?
It is
evident therefore, that we must be prepared to admit that there are other
elements besides those which we have so far laid down as determining the
production of uncanny feelings. We might say that these preliminary results have
satisfied psycho-analytic interest in the problem of the uncanny, and
that what remains probably calls for an aesthetic enquiry. But that would
be to open the door to doubts about what exactly is the value of our general
contention that the uncanny proceeds from something familiar which has been
repressed.
We
have noticed one point which may help us to resolve these uncertainties: nearly
all the instances that contradict our hypothesis are taken from the realm of
fiction, of imaginative writing. This suggests that we should differentiate
between the uncanny that we actually experience and the uncanny that we merely
picture or read about.
What
is experienced as uncanny is much more simply conditioned but comprises
far fewer instances. We shall find, I think, that it fits in perfectly with our
attempt at a solution, and can be traced back without exception to something
familiar that has been repressed. But here, too, we must make a certain
important and psychologically significant differentiation in our material, which
is best illustrated by turning to suitable examples.
Let us
take the uncanny associated with the omnipotence of thoughts, with the prompt
fulfillment of wishes, with secret injurious powers and with the return of the
dead.
The condition under which the feeling of uncanniness arises here is
unmistakable. We — or our primitive forefathers — once believed that these
possibilities were realities, and were convinced that they actually happened.
Nowadays we no longer believe in them, we have surmounted these modes of
thought; but we do not feel quite sure of our new beliefs, and the old ones
still exist within us ready to seize upon any confirmation.
As soon as something actually happens in our lives which seems to confirm
the old, discarded beliefs we get a feeling of the uncanny; it is as though we
were making a judgment something like this: ‘So, after all, it is true
that one can kill a person by the mere wish!’ or, ‘So the dead do live on
and appear on the scene of their former activities!’ and so on. Conversely,
anyone who has completely and finally rid himself of animistic beliefs will be
insensible to this type of the uncanny. The most remarkable coincidences of wish
and fulfillment, the most mysterious repetition of similar experiences in a
particular place or on a particular date, the most deceptive sights and
suspicious noises — none of these things will disconcert him or raise the kind
of fear which can be described as ‘a fear of something uncanny.’ The whole thing
is purely an affair of ‘reality-testing,’ a question of the material
reality of the phenomena.**
The
state of affairs is different when the uncanny proceeds from repressed infantile
complexes, from the castration complex, womb-phantasies, etc.’ but experiences
which arouse this kind of uncanny feeling are not of very frequent occurrence in
real life. The uncanny which proceeds from actual experience belongs for the
most part to the first group [the group dealt with in the previous paragraph].
Nevertheless the distinction between the two is theoretically very important.
Where the uncanny comes from infantile complexes the question of material
reality does not arise; its place is taken by psychical reality. What is
involved is an actual repression of some content of thought and a return of this
repressed content, not a cessation of belief in the reality of such a
content. We might say that in the one case what had been repressed is a
particular ideational content, and in the other the belief in its (material)
reality. But this last phrase no doubt extends the term ‘repression’ beyond its
legitimate meaning. It would be more correct to take into account a
psychological distinction which can be detected here, and to say that the
animistic beliefs of civilized people are in a state of having been (to a
greater or lesser extent) surmounted [rather than repressed].
Our conclusion could then be stated
thus: an uncanny experience occurs either when infantile complexes which have
been repressed are once more revived by some impression, or when primitive
beliefs which have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed. Finally, we
must not let our predilection for smooth solutions and lucid exposition blind us
to the fact that these two classes of uncanny experience are not always sharply
distinguishable. When we consider that primitive beliefs are most intimately
connected with infantile complexes, and are, in fact, based on them, we shall
not be greatly astonished to find that the distinction is often a hazy one.
The
uncanny as it is depicted in literature, in stories and imaginative
productions, merits in truth a separate discussion. Above all, it is a much more
fertile province than the uncanny in real life, for it contains the whole of the
latter and something more besides, something that cannot be found in real life.
The contrast between what has been repressed and what has been surmounted cannot
be transposed on to the uncanny in fiction without profound modification; for
the realm of phantasy depends for its effect on the fact that its content is not
submitted to reality-testing. The somewhat paradoxical result is that in the
first place a great deal that is not uncanny in fiction would be so if it
happened in real life; and in the second place that there are many more means of
creating uncanny effects in fiction than there are in real life.
The
imaginative writer has this license among many others, that he can select his
world of representation so that it either coincides with the realities we are
familiar with or departs from them in what particulars he pleases. We accept his
ruling in every case. In fairy tales, for instance, the world of reality is left
behind from the very start, and the animistic system of beliefs is frankly
adopted. Wish-fulfillments, secret
powers, omnipotence of thoughts, animation of inanimate objects, all the
elements so common in fairy stories, can exert no uncanny influence here; for,
as we have learnt, that feeling cannot arise unless there is a conflict of
judgment as to whether things which have been ‘surmounted’ and are regarded as
incredible may not, after all, be possible; and this problem is eliminated from
the outset by the postulates of the world of fairy tales. Thus we see that
fairy stories, which have furnished us with most of the contradictions to our
hypothesis of the uncanny, confirm the first part of our proposition — that in
the realm of fiction many things are not uncanny which would be so if they
happened in real life. In the case of these stories there are other contributory
factors, which we shall briefly touch upon later.
The
creative writer can also choose a setting which though less imaginary than the
world of fairy tales, does yet differ from the real world by admitting superior
spiritual beings such as daemonic spirits or ghosts of the dead. So long as they
remain within their setting of poetic reality, such figures lose any uncanniness
which they might possess. The souls in Dante’s Inferno, or the
supernatural apparitions in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Macbeth or Julius
Caesar, may be gloomy and terrible enough, but they are no more really
uncanny than Homer’s jovial world of gods.
We adapt our judgment to the imaginary
reality imposed on us by the writer, and regard souls, spirits and ghosts as
though their existence had the same validity as our own has in material reality.
In this case too we avoid all trace of the uncanny.
The
situation is altered as soon as the writer pretends to move in the world of
common reality. In this case he accepts as well all the conditions operating to
produce uncanny feelings in real life; and everything that would have an uncanny
effect in reality has it in his story. But in this case he can even increase his
effect and multiply it far beyond what could happen in reality, by bringing
about events which never or very rarely happen in fact. In doing this he is in a
sense betraying us to the superstitiousness which we have ostensibly surmounted;
he deceives us by promising to give us the sober truth, and then after all
overstepping it.
We react to his inventions as we would have reacted to real experiences; by the
time we have seen through his trick it is already too late and the author has
achieved his object. But it must be added that his success is not unalloyed. We
retain a feeling of dissatisfaction, a kind of grudge against the attempted
deceit. I have noticed this particularly after reading Schnitzler’s Die
Weissagung [The Prophecy] and similar stories which flirt with the
supernatural. However, the writer has one more means which he can use in order
to avoid our recalcitrance and at the same time to improve his chances of
success. He can keep us in the dark for
a long time about the precise nature of the presuppositions on which the world
he writes about is based, or he can cunningly and ingeniously avoid any definite
information on the point to the last. Speaking generally, however, we find a
confirmation of the second part of our proposition — that fiction presents more
opportunities for creating uncanny feelings than are possible in real life.
Strictly
speaking, all these complications relate only to that class of the uncanny which
proceeds from forms of thought that have been surmounted. The class which
proceeds from repressed complexes is more resistant and remains as powerful in
fiction as in real experience, subject to one
exception [see p. 252]. The uncanny
belonging to the first class — that proceeding from forms of thought that have
been surmounted — retains its character not only in experience but in fiction as
well, so long as the setting is one of material reality; but where it is given
an arbitrary and artificial setting in fiction, it is apt to lose that
character.
We
have clearly not exhausted the possibilities of poetic license and the
privileges enjoyed by story-writers in evoking or in excluding an uncanny
feeling. In the main we adopt an unvarying passive attitude towards real
experience and are subject to the influence of our physical environment. But the
story-teller has a peculiarly directive power over us; by means of the
moods he can put us into, he is able to guide the current of our emotions, to
dam it up in one direction and make it flow in another, and he often obtains a
great variety of effects from the same material. All this is nothing new, and
has doubtless long since been fully taken into account by students of
aesthetics. We have drifted into this field of research half involuntarily,
through the temptation to explain certain instances which contradicted our
theory of the causes of the uncanny. Accordingly we will now return to the
examination of a few of those instances.
We
have already asked [p. 246] why it is that the severed hand in the story of the
treasure of Rhampsinitus has no uncanny effect in the way that the severed hand
has in Hauff’s story. The question seems to have gained in importance now that
we have recognized that the class of the uncanny which proceeds from repressed
complexes is the more resistant of the two. The answer is easy. In the Herodotus
story our thoughts are concentrated much more on the superior cunning of the
master-thief than on the feelings of the princess. The princess may very well
have had an uncanny feeling, indeed she very probably fell into a swoon; but
we have no such sensations, for we put ourselves in the thief’s place, not
in hers. In Nestroy’s farce, Der Zerrissene [The Torn Man],
another means is used to avoid any impression of the uncanny in the scene in
which the fleeing man, convinced that he is a murderer, lifts up one trap-door
after another and each time sees what he takes to be the ghost of his victim
rising up out of it. He calls out in despair, ‘But I’ve only killed one
man. Why this ghastly multiplication?’ We know what went before this scene and
do not share his error, so what must be uncanny to him has an irresistibly comic
effect on us. Even a ‘real’ ghost, as in Oscar Wilde’s Canterville Ghost,
loses all power of at least arousing gruesome feelings in us as soon as
the author begins to amuse himself by being ironical about it and allows
liberties to be taken with it. Thus we see how independent emotional effects can
be of the actual subject-matter in the world of fiction. In fairy stories
feelings of fear — including therefore uncanny feelings — are ruled out
altogether. We understand this, and that is why we ignore any opportunities we
find in them for developing such feelings.
Concerning
the factors of silence, solitude and darkness [pp. 246-7], we can only say that
they are actually elements in the production of the infantile anxiety from which
the majority of human beings have never become quite free. This problem has been
discussed from a psycho-analytic point of view elsewhere.
**
Since the uncanny effect of the ‘double also belongs to this same group it is
interesting to observe what the effect is of meeting one’s own image unbidden
and unexpected. Ernest Mach has related two such observations in his Analyse
der Empfindungen (1900, 3). On the first occasion he was not a little
startled when he realized that the face before him was his own. The second time
he formed a very unfavourable opinion about the supposed stranger who entered
the omnibus, and thought ‘What a shabby-looking school-master that man is who is
getting in!’ — I can report a similar adventure. I was sitting alone in my
wagon-lit compartment when a more than usually violent jolt of the train swung
back the door of the adjoining washing-cabinet, and an elderly gentleman in a
dressing-gown and a travelling cap came in. I assumed that in leaving the
washing-cabinet, which lay between the two compartments, he had taken the wrong
direction and come into my compartment by mistake. Jumping up with the intention
of putting him right, I at once realized to my dismay that the intruder was
nothing but my own reflection in the looking-glass on the open door. I can still
recollect that I thoroughly disliked his appearance. Instead, therefore, of
being frightened by our ‘doubles’, both Mach and I simply failed to
recognize them as such. Is it not possible, though, that our dislike of them was
a vestigial trace of the archaic reaction which feels the ‘double’ to something
uncanny?