Uncanny

The uncanny is the psychological experience of something asstrangely familiar, rather than
simply mysterious.[1] It may describe incidents where an everyday object or event is
encountered in an unsettling, eerie, ortaboo context.[2][3]

The concept of the uncanny was perhaps first fixed bySigmund Freud in his 1919 essay Das
Unheimliche.[4] For Freud, the uncanny locates the strangeness of the familiar, confronting
the subject with their own unconscious, repressed desire.[3] Expanding on the idea,
psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan wrote that the uncanny places us "in the field where
we do not know how to distinguish bad and good, pleasure from displeasure", resulting in an
irreducible anxiety that gestures to the Real. The concept has since been taken up by a
variety of subsequent thinkers and theorists such as Roboticist Masahiro Mori's "uncanny
valley" hypothesis and Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection.

Contents
Repliee Q2, an uncannily
History lifelike robot, developed by
German idealism
roboticists at Osaka
Ernst Jentsch University. It can mimic such
Sigmund Freud human functions as blinking,
Related theories breathing and speaking, with
the ability to recognise and
Etymology
process speech and touch,
See also and then respond in kind.
References
Sources
External links

History

German idealism
Philosopher F. W. J. Schelling raised the question of the uncanny in his late Philosophie der Mythologieof 1835, postulating that the
.[5]
Homeric clarity was built upon a prior repression of the uncanny

In The Will to Power manuscript, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche refers to nihilism as "the uncanniest of all guests" and,
earlier, in On the Genealogy of Morals he argues it is the "will to truth" that has destroyed the metaphysics that underpins the values
of Western culture. Hence, he coins the phrase "European nihilism" to describe the condition that afflicts those Enlightenment ideals
that seemingly hold strong values yet undermine themselves.

Ernst Jentsch
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 better oriented in his environment a person is, the less readily will he get the impression of
 [4] He expands upon its use in fiction:
something uncanny in regard to the objects and events in it."

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.[4]

Jentsch identifies German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann as a writer who uses uncanny effects in his work, focusing specifically on
Hoffmann's story "The Sandman" ("Der Sandmann"), which features a lifelike doll, Olympia.

Sigmund Freud
The concept of the Uncanny was later elaborated on and developed by Sigmund Freud in his 1919 essay "The Uncanny", which also
draws on the work of Hoffmann (whom Freud refers to as the "unrivalled master of the uncanny in literature"). However, he criticizes
Jentsch's belief that Olympia is the central uncanny element in the story ("
The Sandman"):

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
.[4]
responsible for the quite unparalleled atmosphere of uncanniness evoked by the story

Instead, Freud draws on a wholly different element of the story, namely, "the idea of being robbed of one's eyes", as the "more
striking instance of uncanniness" in the tale.

Freud goes on, for the remainder of the essay, to identify uncanny effects that result from instances of "repetition of the same thing,"
linking the concept to that of the repetition compulsion.[6] He includes incidents wherein one becomes lost and accidentally retraces
one's steps, and instances wherein random numbers recur, seemingly meaningfully (here Freud may be said to be prefiguring the
concept that Jung would later refer to assynchronicity). He also discusses the uncanny nature ofOtto Rank's concept of the "double".

Freud specifically relates an aspect of the Uncanny derived from German etymology. By contrasting the German adjective
unheimlich with its base word heimlich ("concealed, hidden, in secret"), he proposes that social taboo often yields an aura not only of
pious reverence but even more so of horror and even disgust, as the taboo state of an item gives rise to the commonplace assumption
that that which is hidden from public eye (cf. the eye or sight metaphor) must be a dangerous threat and even an abomination –
especially if the concealed item is obviously or presumingly sexual in nature. Basically, the Uncanny is what unconsciously reminds
us of our own Id, our forbidden and thus repressed impulses – especially when placed in a context of uncertainty that can remind one
of infantile beliefs in the omnipotence of thought.[3] Such uncanny elements are perceived as threatening by our super-ego ridden
with oedipal guilt as it fears symbolic castration by punishment for deviating from societal norms. Thus, the items and individuals
that we project our own repressed impulses upon become a most uncanny threat to us, uncanny monsters and freaks akin to fairy-tale
folk-devils, and subsequently often become scapegoats we blame for all sorts of perceived miseries, calamities, and maladies.

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, unheimlich. What is heimlich thus comes to be unheimlich. [...] 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. [...] 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 isunheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.

[...]
 A study of dreams, phantasies and myths has taught us that anxiety about one's eyes, the fear of going blind [as used
as a central theme in "The Sandman"], 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. [...] All further doubts are removed when we learn the details of their
[4]
'castration complex' from the analysis ofneurotic patients, and realize its immense importance in their mental life.

After Freud, Jacques Lacan, in his 1962–1963 seminar "L'angoisse" ("Anxiety"), used the Unheimlich "via regia" to enter into the
territory of Angst.[7] Lacan showed how the same image that seduces the subject, trapping him in the narcissistic impasse, may
suddenly, by a contingency, show that it is dependent on something, some hidden object, and so the subject may grasp at the same
time that he is not autonomous (5 December 1962). For example, and as a paradigm, Guy de Maupassant, in his story "Le Horla",
describes a man who suddenly may see his own back in the mirror. His back is there, but it is deprived of the gaze of the subject. It
appears as a strange object, until he feels it is his own. There is no cognitive dissonance here, we rather cross all possible cognition,
to find ourselves in the field where we do not know how to distinguish bad and good, pleasure from displeasure. And this is the signal
of anxiety: the signal of the real, as irreducible to any signifier
.

Hitchcock was the master in the art of conducing art into the world of Unheimlich.[8] He used simple, everyday objects who may
[9]
suddenly lose their familiar side, and become the messenger of beyond narcissism.

Related theories
This concept is closely related to Julia
Kristeva's concept of abjection, where
one reacts adversely to something
forcefully cast out of the symbolic
order. Abjection can be uncanny in
that the observer can recognize
something within the abject, possibly
of what it was before it was 'cast out',
yet be repulsed by what it is that
caused it to be cast out to begin with.
Kristeva lays special emphasis on the
uncanny return of the past abject with
relation to the 'uncanny stranger'.[10]

Sadeq Rahimi has noted a common

relationship between the uncanny and
direct or metaphorical visual
references, which he explains in terms
of basic processes of ego Hypothesized emotional response of human subjects is plotted against
development, specifically as anthropomorphism of a robot, following roboticistMasahiro Mori's theory of the
developed by Lacan's theory of the uncanny. The uncanny valley is the region ofnegative emotional response
mirror stage. Rahimi presents a wide towards robots that seem "almost human". Movement amplifies the emotional
response.
range of evidence from various
contexts to demonstrate how uncanny
experiences are typically associated with themes and metaphors of vision, blindness, mirrors and other optical tropes. He also
presents historical evidence showing strong presence of ocular and specular themes and associations in the literary and psychological
tradition out of which the notion of 'the uncanny' emerged. According to Rahimi, instances of the uncanny like doppelgängers,
ghosts, déjà vu, alter egos, self-alienations and split personhoods, phantoms,twins, living dolls, etc. share two important features: that
[11]
they are closely tied with visual tropes, and that they are variations on the theme of doubling of the ego.
Roboticist Masahiro Mori's "uncanny valley" hypothesis (describing human reactions to human-like robots) describes the gap
between familiar living people and their also familiar inanimate representations, such as statues or pictures. The things in the valley
are between these two poles of common phenomena. The hypothesis is deeply indebted to Jentsch and Freud's observations.

Etymology
Canny is from the Anglo-Saxon root ken: "knowledge, understanding, or cognizance; mental perception: an idea beyond one's
ken."[12] Thus the uncanny is something outside one's familiar knowledge or perceptions.

See also
Animism
Archaic mother
Creepiness
Déjà vu
Evil eye
Gothic fiction
Simulacrum

References
1. Royle, p. 1
2. Royle, p. vii
3. D. Bate, Photography and Surrealism(2004) p. 39-40
4. Freud, Sigmund (1919). "Das Unheimliche" (http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~amtower/uncanny
.html).
5. A. Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny(1994) p. 26
6. N. Royle, The Uncanny (2003) p. 90
7. A. Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny(1994) p. 224
8. N. Royle, The Uncanny (2003) p. 103
9. S. Zizek, Looking Awry (1992) p. 117
10. S. Beardsworth, Julia Kristeva (2012) pp. 189–92
11. Rahimi, S. (June 2013). "The ego, the ocular, and the uncanny: Why are metaphors of vision central in accounts of
the uncanny?". The International Journal of Psychoanalysis. Wiley-Blackwell. 94 (3): 453–476. doi:10.1111/j.1745-
8315.2012.00660.x (https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-8315.2012.00660.x) . PMID 23781831 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.g
ov/pubmed/23781831).
12. "Definition of ken" (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ken). Dictionary.com.

Sources
Royle, Nicholas (2003).The Uncanny. Manchester University Press.ISBN 978-0-7190-5561-4.

External links
The dictionary definition ofuncanny at Wiktionary
Freud, 'The Uncanny'

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