The Uncanny

In the final section of his essay, Freud sets out to allay the doubts that have accumulated in his readers’ minds. Freud returns to his discussion of the semantics of the term heimlich on which his definition of the uncanny rests: “It may be true that the uncanny is nothing else than a hidden, familiar thing that has undergone repression and then emerged from it, and that everything that is uncanny fulfils this condition” (152).

Freud now claims to address the limitations of this definition, which does “not solve the problem of the uncanny” (152), namely, that the resurgence of “archaic material” is not always uncanny. Freud draws the example of the severed hand in Hauff’s fairytale, which he says is uncanny, but contrasts it with Herodotus’s story of Rhampsenitus, in which a severed hand has no uncanny effect. Yet in “The Ring of Polycrates,” the immediate realization of the king’s wishes is uncanny. However, Freud reasons, fairytales are full of wish-fulfilments that do not produce uncanny effects. This is because “fairytales […] adopt the animistic standpoint of the omnipotence of thoughts and wishes” (153). Nor are Hans Andersen’s living household utensils or the animation of Pygmalion’s statue uncanny. Likewise, tales of the dead coming back to life in Snow White and the Bible are not uncanny. Freud states that “darkness and solitude” are common features of the uncanny, which may be because they are associated with the aforementioned “intellectual uncertainty,” and its relation to death.

Evidently, Freud says, there is more to the definition of the uncanny. Though the preliminary facets of the definition “have satisfied psychoanalytic interest,” Freud now pursues an “aesthetic valuation” of the uncanny (155).Fictional instances of the uncanny more often challenge its definition as the return of the repressed, suggesting a schism between the real and fictional experience of the uncanny. Real-life instances are more easily and more rarely produced than fictional ones. To illustrate this, Freud turns to several real-life examples.

Freud argues that arcane beliefs (such as the belief in the omnipotence of thoughts) can resurface when circumstances seem to imply them. The Uncanny disappears in someone who “has completely and finally dispelled animistic beliefs” (155). Freud argues that the uncanny is ultimately linked with “testing reality,” or “questioning the material reality of the phenomena” (that is, the uncanny phenomena) (17).In contrast, the question of reality is irrelevant in cases of the uncanny that arise from what Freud calls “infantile complexes.” In such cases, the psychical reality has precedence over the objective reality, which is repressed. Freud concludes: “An uncanny experience occurs either when repressed infantile complexes have been revived by some impression, or when the primitive beliefs we have surmounted seem once more to be confirmed” (155).

These two kinds of uncanny (namely, those arising from infantile complexes and those arising from ontological uncertainty) are not always “sharply distinguishable” according to Freud (16). This is because primitive beliefs and infantile complexes are often “intimately connected” (156).

Having considered these two forms of real-life uncanny, Freud turns to a discussion of the uncanny “as it is depicted in literature,” which he deems a “much more fertile province” (18).There is a significant difference between real and fictional uncanny experiences, because fiction is defined by the rule that “its content is not submitted to the reality-testing faculty” (157). What is uncanny in real life would not be uncanny in fiction, and there is far more scope for the uncanny in fiction. Fairytales, for example, “frankly” observe an animistic belief system, according to Freud. The suspension of disbelief prevents fiction from appearing uncanny. This changes as soon as the writer “pretends to move in the world of common reality” (157). The writer “takes advantage, as it were, of our supposedly surmounted superstitiousness,” such that the reader retains “a kind of grudge against the attempted deceit” (157). Freud says he experienced this upon reading stories about the supernatural, such as Schnitzler’s Die Weissagung.

In contrast, the form of the uncanny that results from the repressed rather than the surmounted is as powerful in fiction as in reality, except when placed into an unrealistic fictional setting. The storyteller “has a peculiarly directive influence over us” (157). Freud now turns to several examples of the uncanny that refine his definition. Uncanny events that arise from repressed material are the most “durable.” In the Herodotus story, we feel no uncanniness, Freud argues, because we identify with the thief and not the princess, who probably did have an uncanny feeling. Emotional effects and subject matter can be independent of each other in fiction, especially in fairy tale stories in which fear is not aroused. The factors of silence, solitude, and darkness are components of the infantile morbid anxiety “from which the majority of human beings have never become quite free” (159).