One Hundred Years of the Uncanny

In 2019, in celebration of the century that has passed since Freud (1919) wrote his paper “The Uncanny” (Das Unheimliche), the Freud Museum in London held the exhibition “The Uncanny: A Centenary.” As one watches the forty-two seconds of the exhibition trailer, suspenseful music plays, and images of doppelgängers, ominous stairs, grotesque statues, and humanoid robots are displayed. The following words appear: horror, repulsion, animated objects, the double, ghosts and spirits, castration complex, return of the repressed, fear of death. Then this statement comes into view:

Some people are more susceptible to the effects of the uncanny but everyone has experienced it at one time or another. Have you?

This exhibition took place between October 30, 2019 and February 9, 2020, ending just as the COVID-19 pandemic was beginning to cast its shadow. By the time Freud had written his 1919 paper, the Spanish flu was on its way to infecting nearly a third of the world population in what became known as the influenza pandemic (February 1918 to April 1920). Freud lost his twenty six year old daughter Sophie to that pandemic. In reference to this loss, he writes to his friend Pastor Oskar Pfister on January 27, 1920:

That afternoon we received the news that our sweet Sophie in Hamburg had been snatched away by influenzal pneumonia, snatched away in the midst of glowing health, from a full and active life as a competent mother and loving wife, all in four or five days, as though she had never existed. (Letters of Sigmund Freud 1873-1939 (ed. Ernst L. Freud), 327)

And to Sándor Ferenczi on February 4, 1920:

Dear friend,

Don’t worry about me. I am the same except for somewhat more fatigue. The death, as painful as it is, does not overturn any attitude toward life. For years I was prepared for the loss of my sons, now comes that of my daughter. Since I am profoundly unbelieving, I have no one to blame, and I know there is no place where one can lodge a complaint. The “eternally uniformly set clock of duty” and the “sweet habit of being” will do the rest, in order to let everything continue on an even keel. Very deep within I perceive the feeling of a deep, insurmountable narcissistic insult. (The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi [hereinafter Freud-Ferenczi], Volume 3, 1920-1933, 6-7)

Freud’s loss is couched in the language of the familiar, the expected, the regimented (“I was prepared,” “clock of duty,” “habit of being,” “even keel”). And yet beneath this language is an experience that reveals just the opposite: the unforeseeable “insult” of a radiant daughter reduced to memories “as though she had never existed.” Resilience and yearning are both in tension and in harmony.

Viewed in this light, Freud’s explorations in The Uncanny take on a particularly powerful resonance. In that work, Freud sees the phenomenon of the uncanny as something belonging to the realm of the frightening, invoking fear and dread. In his effort to define it, Freud—ever the scholar— investigates the term’s genealogy in a host of languages, producing pages of etymological investigation and inferring that many languages lack a term for this specific feeling. In a passage of particular relevance here, he notes that, in German, uncanny (umheimlich; “unhomely”) contains its opposite (heimlich; “homely”), highlighting the strange in the ordinary, discomfort in comfort. Freud writes:

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 of the uncanny as something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to life. (Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (ed., trans., James Strachey) [hereinafter SE], Volume XVII, 241)

He then elaborates:

Concerning the factors of silence, solitude, and darkness, we can only say that they are actually elements in the production of that infantile morbid anxiety from which a majority of human beings have never become quite free. (SE XVII, 252)

Lacan likewise speaks of the uncanny (étrange, inquietant, lugubre) in his Seminar X: Anxiety (L’angoisse). He situates the uncanny in his theory of anxiety at the minus phi (-φ), at the place of castration, loss of phallus (symbolic and imaginary), and lack. In this schema, the uncanny connotes feelings of unbearable anxiety.

The same phenomenon is also embedded in Julia Kristeva’s idea of the the abject. The abject is the horror in response to the threatened dissolution of the border delimiting the interior and the exterior of the body—between purity and defilement, subject and object, self and other. She locates the abject in crimes, corpses, and bodily fluids that are conceived as transgressions (The Powers of Horror (1982)).

Freud and Lacan’s explorations take us to that hidden, haunting space where the uncanny—the strange/stranger (étrange/étranger)—lives. For Kristeva, it is the sociopolitical effects of being estranged that are the most palpable.

Over the past year our global society has faced something for which we were not prepared, despite the fact that pandemics and plagues have been part of our history. The virus has brought us dread, fear of death, unbearable anxiety, isolation, and darkness. It has forced us to question whether we are safe. We have felt discomfort amid the familiar. It has ruptured the line between imagination and reality. Contagion is no longer only a movie; it’s the reality we live in. The virus is something we wish would have remained hidden, repressed, unfamiliar. Submerged feelings of anguish, helplessness, anger, and rage have returned as the changes we have experienced over the past year challenge and unravel the stability of our repressive structures.

It’s not difficult to see how images of untold corpses awaiting burial during the first wave of the pandemic brought the question of our own mortality too close for comfort—Kristeva’s subject and object blurring. The reality of what nature can produce subverts our quotidian belief that our trauma is safely tucked away. And, with our defenses lowered, repressed libidinal impulses return in raw or in derivative form.

We now are living with an uncanny natural force, a virus that has made us face our primal fear of death, that has challenged our primary narcissism, and that has paralyzed society as we used to know it. Infrastructures—physical, financial, emotional—have collapsed, health systems have buckled under overwhelming pressure, inequalities have been impossible to deny. We have seen anguished calls for social justice, as income disparities have worsened and political divisions have brought us near the point of self-destruction. We have learned to function in a virtual world, our lives at times resembling a science-fiction movie. We self-isolate, we socially distance ourselves, we disinfect to preserve the limits between ourselves and the outside. To describe the experience as surreal (sur; “above, beyond”) is entirely accurate: we are living on the other side of the familiar.

In light of the insights our own experience yields, it’s perhaps not surprising that Freud composed Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Jenseits des Lustprinzips, 1920) soon after The Uncanny. With the War coming to its conclusion and the influenza pandemic raging, Freud seems to have had beauty and horror—life and destruction—on his mind. Indeed, Freud ties together the two works, along with his own experience in writing them, in a letter to Sándor Ferenczi dated May 12, 1919:

Dear friend,

I hear that a letter will arrive now and then, and so I am writing you on the off chance; for a long time I have been unable to keep up with what I have already told you. The ban is very bad; aside from the euphoric telephone reports that Rank is getting from the Journal, I have nothing from any of you and am totally at the mercy of my fantasy. I read something out of your last lines about Toni which I already had in mind at the beginning of this supposed relapse and which was since confirmed in a letter from Lajos of April 20, which arrived late. So I don't know how things have been going since, and since my own complaints, about which I wrote to you, are constantly increasing, I am figuring on not seeing him again. With this news on the 6th of the month, an inhibition in my up to then increased productivity set in. I had not only completed the draft of “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” which is being copied out for you, but I also took up the little thing about the “uncanny” again, and, with a simple-minded idea [Einfall], I attempted a Ψα foundation for group psychology. (Freud-Ferenczi, Volume 2, 1914-1919, 354-355)

The two works, written in tandem, work in tandem. The return of (or to) the repressed, embedded in the nature of the uncanny, also forms the basis for the framework Freud sets out in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. As Freud writes in The Uncanny:

For it 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. (SE, Volume XVII, 238)

Taking up this inexorable compulsion to repeat in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud examines the interplay between Eros (life instinct) and Thanatos (death instinct). While Eros’s aim is self-preservation and the nurturance of life, Thanatos manifests itself in our aggressive, destructive impulses, in our shared violent nature, in—ultimately—a return to the inorganic. Indeed, as he puts it, “then we shall be compelled to say that ‘the aim of all life is death’ and, looking backwards, that ‘inanimate things existed before living ones.’” (SE, Volume XVIII, 38) These daemonic characters of the mind work in dualistic fashion; one can turn into the other.

A century ago, the world in which Freud was writing faced the influenza pandemic. We are now facing our own global tragedy. Living amid the uncanny, we are witnessing the vicissitudes of our instincts in response to collective trauma, just as, perhaps, Freud did.

As the Freud Museum’s exhibition reminds us, The Uncanny is one of the countless Freud works that “went on to inspire art, film, literature and further psychoanalytic inquiry.” Equally resonant, though, are the traces of Freud’s lived experience that we can sense in this text.

In that vein, on the occasion of the exhibition, the Museum chose to display the couch on which Freud died (rarely seen). Beyond the visual metaphor of the couch, the Museum’s choice is, perhaps, an invitation to imagine the scene: how, in Freud’s last days, he continued to write despite his illness, saw a small number of patients, and enjoyed his garden. The palpable, quotidian details of these last moments fill the mind. From up close, we can sense this loss. It is a strangely familiar one.

Here's the link to access the Freud Museum’s exhibition.