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Issue 5. The Uncanny - Guest editor: Anneleen Masschelein

A Homeless Concept
Shapes of the Uncanny in Twentieth-Century
Theory and Culture
Author: Anneleen Masschelein
Published: January 2003
Abstract (E): This article sketches the framework underlying the present
thematic issue. A functionalist-discursive analysis of the linguistic form and
evolution of the Freudian concept of the uncanny in the late twentieth century
reveals a paradox: as a concept, the uncanny problematises the very act of
conceptualisation and theory formation. And yet, as the various contributions to
this issue show, precisely because of its structural vagueness/openness, the
concept seems particularly suited to articulate certain tendencies in late
twentieth-century thought and art.
Abstract (F): Cet article esquisse le cadre thorique des contributions de ce
numro. L'analyse discursive et fonctionnaliste des formes et de l'volution du
conception freudien d' unheimlich ( inquitante tranget , selon la
traduction en usage) fait apparatre un paradoxe : le concept mme d'unheimlich
s'oppose en effet sa propre conceptualisation et, plus gnralement, toute
approche thorique du phnomne. Toutefois, les articles runis dans ce numro
montrent aussi que l'ambivalence du concept d' unheimlich , qui reste la fois
flou et ouvert, le rend particulirement appropri l'analyse de certaines
tendances artistiques et philosophiques de la fin du vingtime sicle.
Keywords: the uncanny, Freud, re-readings, discourse analysis,
conceptualization

The present special issue of Image and Narrative is devoted to a somewhat

intangible topic, the concept of the uncanny and its shapes in theory and culture.
The various papers originate within a series of specialised seminars1, which started
from an abstract problem: what is a concept, how does it come into being and how
is it as such recognised and acknowledged. We have tried to formulate a partial
answer to these questions by concentrating on a particular case: das Unheimliche or
the Freudian uncanny. By way of introducing the question, I would like to make
some remarks concerning the relation between on the one hand, the specific content
of a notion and, on the other hand, a more functionalist-discursive approach
focusing on the particular historical conceptual development.2 In the case of the
concept of the uncanny, we are faced with a paradoxical situation. Although the
history of its conceptualisation can be clearly traced because it is a relatively young
concept, the uncanny has gradually come to signify the very problem or even
impossibility of clearly defined concepts as such.

1. The "origin": Freud

"Das Unheimliche" is an essay written by Freud in 1919 in which the phenomenon of
the uncanny is approached from various angles: language and semantics versus
experience; literature and myth versus everyday life and psychoanalytic practice;
the individual feeling versus the universal phenomenon. Freud's essay is a direct
response to the psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch's study "ber die Psychologie des
Unheimlichen" (translated as "On the Psychology of the Uncanny"). For Freud, as for

Jentsch, the uncanny is a specific - mild - form of anxiety, related to certain

phenomena in real life and to certain motives in art, especially in fantastic literature.
Examples of such phenomena or literary motives are the double, strange repetitions,
the omnipotence of thought (i.e., the idea that your wishes or thoughts come true),
the confusion between animate and inanimate, and other experiences related to
madness, superstition or death. From the outset of his investigation, Freud qualifies
the uncanny as an aesthetic experience. Aesthetic is here used in the broad sense of
"the study of the qualities of our sentiments" as opposed to the narrow sense, "the
study of the beautiful", which, according to Freud, limits its scope to positive
feelings. The fact that the uncanny is related to aesthetics also accounts for the
subjectivity of the experience: Freud insists that not everyone is equally susceptible
to the feeling of the uncanny, and the list of phenomena is neither conclusive, nor
generally accepted. Especially in literature, it depends on the treatment of the
material whether a motive is uncanny or not. Nevertheless, Freud does not doubt
the existence of the sentiment as such: both in everyday life and in art, the uncanny
occurs, otherwise there would not be a specific word for it.
Freud's characterisation of aesthetic phenomena in terms of "the qualities of our
sentiments" can be related to the peculiar grammatical form of the term das
Unheimliche, which will turn out to be symptomatic for its paradoxical situation as a
concept. Instead of the regular derivative substantive Unheimlichkeit (uncanniness),
the title of Freud's essay consists of a substantivised adjective. Thus, grammatically
speaking, the uncanny belongs to a category of concepts like the grotesque and das
Erhabene (the sublime), unlike semantically related nouns like alienation
(Verfremdung), or fear (Angst). The connotation of the substantivised adjective
seems to lie somewhere in between the closedness and definiteness of the
substantive on the one hand, which refers to a clearly demarcated entity or
phenomenon, and the adjective on the other hand, which belongs to everyday
language with the more versatile, indeterminate use this entails. As such, the
adjective is a qualifying addition, a supplement: it is not "necessary" in the strict
sense, it merely adds something to the noun it accompanies.
This qualifying or embellishing function brings the adjective closer to the realm of
the poetic metaphor, rather than to the scientific concept. In The Rule of Metaphor
Ricoeur draws attention to Frege's postulate concerning the specific nature of
literature as "that sort of discourse that has no denotation but only connotations"
(122), meaning that literature has nothing to do with reference to an outside reality,
but only refers to an intratextual reality. At first sight, however, Freud clearly
assumes that there is a stable referent for the uncanny in reality: the uncanny exists
and hence it can be described and defined. In order to determine the "essence" of
the uncanny, Freud proposes a double investigation. First, he will proceed inductively
by finding the common denominator of a great many cases of the uncanny. Then, he
will confront these results with a semantic and etymological study of the meaning of
the adjective. The question of reference becomes problematic on both accounts.
According to Kofman and Cixous, Freud's complementary investigations are circular:
the dictionary is called upon to corroborate the results of the case studies, but the
one has no more reality than the other, because Freud merely confirms his
interpretations by another interpretation. Not only is he thus trapped in the
hermeneutic circle, he is also unable to distinguish between literal meaning and
metaphorical meaning, between denotation and connotation, between reality and
fiction.3
Let me consider for the moment the second, etymological research, which is
presented first in the essay. In the lengthy display of dictionary entries Freud
reproduces, there are several difficulties which have to do with the negativity of the
notion. Un-heimlich is the negation of the adjective heimlich, derived from the
semantic core of Heim, home. Except, it turns out that heimlich has two meanings.
The first sense is the most literal: domestic, familiar, intimate. The second meaning
departs from the positive, literal sense to the more negative metaphorical sense of

hidden, secret, clandestine, furtive. One might say that a certain change of
perspective has taken place: in the positive sense, heimlich takes the insideperspective of the intimacy of the home. In the negative sense, by contrast, the
walls of the house shield the interior and in the eyes of the outsider, the
secludedness of the inner circle is associated with secrecy and conspiracy.
Unheimlich in the sense of strange, unfamiliar, uncanny, eerie, sinister is then
clearly the negation of only the first meaning of heimlich and as such, it almost
coincides with the second, negative meaning of heimlich. This peculiar etymology
runs counter to the intuition and already complicates the straightforward scheme of
familiar versus strange and hence frightening, proposed by Jentsch. Freud concludes
his lexicographic research by stating that the specificity of the sensation of the
uncanny lies in the fact that something is frightening, not because it is unfamiliar or
new, but because what used to be familiar has somehow become strange. He quotes
a phrase by Schelling which formulates precisely this relation: "unheimlich is that
what ought to have remained hidden, but has nonetheless come to light". And yet,
the reader may be left wondering whether this 'definition' correspond to an 'actual'
feeling, or whether we dealing with a metaphor?
When discussing the examples of the uncanny - already problematic in themselves
because of their divergent, almost incompatible nature - Freud relates the idea of
the familiar which has become strange to the psychoanalytic notion of repression.
What is frightening is the return of the repressed. In his view, the prefix un- is none
other than the mark of repression. With this prefix we are of course but one step
removed from the quintessential Freudian concept, the unconscious, which is in a
way an equally 'unthinkable' concept. The very notion of the unconscious excludes
the idea of a consciously thinking, rational subject which is, as Samuel Weber points
out, the basis of Western thought since Descartes and Kant. Likewise, how can we
think the unheimliche as the negation of an ambivalent word like heimlich, if we
cannot be sure of a stable referent in the first place? According to Weber, this
explains why (I quote from an excerpt of the introduction to a new edition of The
Legend of Freud)
the Uncanny, das Unheimliche, remains as abseitig, as marginal a topic as it was
when Freud first wrote on it. Perhaps, because it is not simply a 'topic', much less a
'concept', but rather a very particular kind of scene: one which would call into
question the separation of subject and object generally held to be indispensable to
scientific and scholarly inquiry, experimentation and cognition (). (Weber 1998)

2. The conceptualisation of the uncanny: a

functionalist-discursive perspective
To a certain extent, Weber is right about the marginality of the uncanny in
psychoanalytic theory and practice.4 In the years following its publication, the essay
was hardly noticed. Only a few attempts have been made to examine the notion
from a clinical perspective: Bergler (1934), Grotjahn (1948) and Lacan in his
unpublished seminar on anxiety (1962-1963). However, in the seventies and the
eighties, the uncanny starts to receive more attention, especially in Lacanian circles.
In 1972, Mrigot characterises the shift in the following terms:
Psychoanalytic concepts circulate on the theoretical scene. They wear out, become
tired, lose their freshness. Other theoretical formulations succeed the concepts of
the first hour, concepts of a second level appear. Thus it is with the unheimliche,
which, although it does not occupy a central position in the Freudian development, is
nevertheless, for those who pay attention to it, an important and complex concept:
complex by its mode of functioning which is often allusive and subterranean in the
texts inspired by psychoanalysis, important because it is situated at one of the nods
of the theoretical articulation of analysis. (Mrigot: 100, my translation)
Gradually, the notion is more and more accepted as a concept. The Revue Franaise
de la psychanalyse (1981) and the Belgian journal Psychoanalytische Perspectieven

(1992) both devote thematic issues to the uncanny. Moreover, the concept is
included in a number of recent psychoanalytic dictionaries.5
Yet, the bulk of the critical and theoretical reception of "Das Unheimliche" is located
in the field of aesthetics: literary theory and criticism, art history, philosophy,
architecture and cultural studies. The growing interest in the uncanny in literary
studies first occurred in the late sixties, early seventies, and coincided with the
transition of structuralism to post-structuralism. On the one hand, Todorov briefly
discusses Freud's essay in his structural study of the genre of the fantastic. Thus, he
insured a lasting interest in the uncanny in the context of the genre study of the
fantastic, the gothic and other related genres, which is still a vivid tradition in
literary theory and criticism. On the other hand, a number of important readings of
Freud's essay from a post-structuralist and/or deconstructive perspective have
shaped the present form of the concept, and they function as theoretical landmarks
in their own right. The most important examples are Cixous, Weber, Kofman and
Hertz in the seventies and early eighties, more recent instances are Moller and
Lydenberg.
I refer to these studies as "rereadings" in order to stress the specific form they take.
They all share an interest in the rhetorical, discursive and even literary or narrative
qualities of Freud's writing, rather than a scientific or conceptual approach. Very
often, the particular fictional aspect of the texts and the emphasis on reading (both
Freud's reading and the critic's) is already hinted at in the titles. Let me quote a few
examples: "Fiction and its Phantoms A reading of Freud's Das Unheimliche "
(Cixous), The Freudian Reading, Analytical and Fictional Constructions (Moller),
Reading Freud's Reading (Gilman), Quatre Romans analytiques (Kofman), Freud's
Masterplot (Brooks), and "Freud's Uncanny Narratives" (Lydenberg). Other titles
stress the supplementary and complementary function of the commentaries and
interpretations: "The Sideshow, or: Remarks on a Canny Moment" (Weber),
"L'inquitante tranget. Notes sur l'unheimliche" (Mrigot) and "Quelques notes de
lecture concernant "Das Unheimliche"" (Van Hoorde).
All texts seem to take the phenomenon of the uncanny for granted, but, like Weber,
most critics question not just the validity of Freud's study, but the very possibility
and ideal of scientific knowledge and definite concepts per se. In Freud's oeuvre - in
particular his notions of the unconscious and the uncanny - critics see either a
forerunner of this deconstruction of Western logocentrism (positive attitude), or an
example of this mode of thought to be deconstructed (negative). Cixous's reading is
the first and most influential in this respect. Through strategies of parody and
mimicry, she highlights the uncertainty and elusiveness that pervade Freud's
attempts to define the uncanny. She reads his essay not as a theoretical study, but
as a piece of fiction. As I have pointed out before, in "Das Unheimliche", Freud was
faced with the problem of the uncanny in fiction. Literary discourse offers at once
more and less possibilities for the uncanny, for the effect can be either fortified or
toned down at the will of the writer. So any classification of uncanny phenomena is
thwarted by fiction, for literary texts provide evidence and counter-evidence for
every hypothesis and category.
Cixous goes one step further when she questions whether any sharp distinction can
be drawn between reality and fiction. After all, the subjectivity of reading and
interpretation is not limited to fiction, it infects any attempt at interpretation, even if
it presents itself as scientific. Cixous seems to agree with Ricoeur (against Frege)
that it is not very fruitful to see the difference between fiction and reality in terms of
reference. Fiction does speak a sort of reality6 , moreover, according to Cixous,
reality is always also fictitious: so-called objective knowledge of reality is no more
true than fiction is. In trying to pin down the meaning of the uncanny, Freud is only
confronted with its elusiveness. Every attempt to determine its essence is doomed to
failure, because it entails a necessary repression of the doubt that is inherent in the
uncanny. And by Freud's own definition, the repressed always returns and thus the

uncertainty that he had hoped to expel, is always reintroduced. However, in

behaving like a writer of fiction, Freud does manage to convey a sense of the
uncanny, not by what he says, but by what escapes him.7
Neil Hertz also reads Freud's essay along similar lines, when he analyses the
problem of figurative language in speculative texts. In Freud's Jenseits des
Lustprinzips and in its precursor, "Das Unheimliche", he examines the theoretical
presuppositions of the repetition compulsion and the death drive. Freud is unable to
provide convincing, real evidence for these hypothetical constructions,
notwithstanding the fact that he was forced to posit them by the confrontation with
clinical data that could not be accounted for in psychoanalytic theory at that point.
Therefore, these theoretical assumptions can only be described in figurative
language, they are metaphors used to circumscribe certain gaps in the theory. Hertz
also draws attention to the problem of an adequate meta-language: how can one
speak about problems like metaphor, model and analogy without using figurative
language? Furthermore, is it at all possible to distinguish between literal and
figurative language, between content and form of discourse?8 Hertz's
problematisation of figurative language in Freud's theoretical speculations can be
generalised to scientific language and models in general, as has been done by a.o.
Ricoeur.
In Mtaphore et concept Claudine Normand (a linguist working in the field of the
French analyse du discours in the seventies) specifically tackles these questions from
the perspective of discourse analysis. She denounces the problem of a clear-cut
distinction between metaphor and concept as somehow beside the point. In her
view, psychoanalysis and discourse analysis may lead to a new perspective on
science and the problem of metaphor and reference. Psychoanalysis as an overtly
metaphorical science renders the opposition between metaphor and concept
obsolete, because tropes and analogies function in a specific way. On the one hand,
metaphorical psychoanalytic concepts like e.g., repression, the unconscious and the
drive, are illustrations of phenomena. They are images used for didactic purposes,
but at the same time they also have a heuristic function. They stimulate the
development of a science and make it dynamic. The tension between subjectivity
and objectivity that is created cannot be settled in terms of the classical hierarchical
opposition of proper/figurative or in terms of the traditional scientific ideal of
univocal meaning, for the opposition between conscious and unconscious allows for
the simultaneous existence of ambivalent meanings in their own right, without
cancelling each other out.
Thus the possibility of a new theory of representation is open, by putting into
question the very "common and comfortable distinction between a term of reality
and its representation" because "one and the same text, or better still, one and the
same letter, at the same time constitutes and represents the unconscious desire".
(Normand: 127)
Like Cixous, Weber and Hertz, Normand also deconstructs the classical opposition
between science and fiction, however, less radical than Cixous, she does not want to
destroy the possibility of science and meta-language. Rather, she advocates a new
type of theoretical discourse, in which the subject of scientific discourse clearly
comes to the fore. That is, the sense of metaphoricity and subjectivity need not be
repressed, because a certain ambiguity and indefiniteness are tolerated. More
concretely, Normand proposes to distinguish between the level of production of
discourse and the level of function. On the level of production of scientific language,
the play of metaphor and its endless displacement are accounted for and the process
of signification is perceived as ambiguous, open and indefinite on the one hand and
rooted in a subject on the other hand. Nevertheless, the polysemy on this level does
not prevent a concept from functioning, from producing effects, both intersubjective
(the emergence of the truth of a subject), and in a socio-historically determined
formation (ideological truth). Following Althusser, Normand states that the

production of knowledge by scientific discourse is the result of a complex process, or

the "synthesis of a multiplicity of determinations". The fact that knowledge is also
metaphorically determined "does not invalidate the real historical effects of this
discourse". (Normand: 142)
How are we to relate this back to the conceptual history of the uncanny? What is
attractive in Normand's proposal, is the possibility to approach the uncanny as a
concept from a functionalist-discursive perspective, without obliterating its semantic
complexity. Unlike Cixous or Weber, I am not inclined to characterise the notion in
terms of a "coreless concept" or a "particular, marginal kind of scene". In the light of
the current state of thought, I believe that the distinction between metaphor and
concept in terms of content, origin and a traditional, monosemic view of science is
highly problematic. Formulating the question in terms of either/or may, to a certain
extent, have lost some of its pertinence. From a functionalist perspective, the
uncanny is a concept because it is identified as such, as is testified by the numerous
entries for the uncanny in various dictionaries and vocabularies, by its listing in
indices and tables of content, by its inclusion as key word or subject category in
bibliographical instruments and search engines on the internet, and lastly, by its
occurrence in titles.
I agree with Martin Jay that "in the 1990's the uncanny has become a master trope
available for appropriation in a wide variety of contexts" and that it is so because, as
Jay rightly points out, "by common consent, the theoretical inspiration for the
current fascination with the concept is Freud's 1919 essay" (Jay: 20). Freud's text
may provide an anchoring point for the history of the conceptualisation, but it only
functions as a beginning or arche by common consent, by an unspoken agreement
among a community of users of the concept. As Freud demonstrated in his article,
the uncanny is, like many other concepts, a word taken from common language,
which is metaphorically charged with a certain meaning. Therefore, it is impossible
to reduce the origin of these kinds of concepts to just one text or to just one usage.
On the other hand, there must always a "first" one to lift such a word from its
ordinary context, and to put it forward as a topic for reflection, in this case Freud.9
In order to survive, however, a concept must also take on a life of its own. A number
of identifiable procedures in a body of texts may testify to that independent
existence. I will briefly sum up three of these discursive procedures, the list is
certainly not conclusive.
A first strategy is the reduction of the concept to standard formulations which
eventually get to function as definitions. For instance, many critics refer to
Schelling's phrase ("what ought to have remained hidden, but has nonetheless come
to light") as a kind of definition, even if this was not the case in the original text.
Other such formulations are "the familiar which has become strange", or "the return
of the repressed". Moreover, certain topoi associated with the concept may trigger
its use. One such topos is the isotopy of home and homelessness, which has
resulted in an alternative translation for unheimlich, namely unhomely (especially in
architecture and postcolonial discourse). Another common association is the
semantic field of haunting, ghosts, spectres and the return of the dead. Finally, the
access to the founding text becomes mediated: for instance, when Homi Bhaba uses
the concept, he no longer directly refers to Freud's essay, but to Cixous's and
Weber's readings of it.

3. The Uses and Shapes of the Uncanny

The uncanny is thus in practice a concept which paradoxically thematises the
impossibility of conceptualisation in the traditional sense of a self-contained entity.
Like the concept of the unconscious, it is a negative concept and hence internally
contradictory, for by virtue of its negativity, it indicates something which cannot be
rationally and consciously thought. Like the sublime, the substantivised adjective
denotes not an entity but a quality, which is why it is an aesthetic concept: it
expresses a subjective sentiment which cannot be captured in words, for the

generality of language always in a way betrays the individuality of experience. And

yet, the problematic content of these concepts does not prevent them from
functioning. For as humans, we are both individuals and social beings, we need a
common language to communicate our experiences. All the articles in the present
issue address various ways in which the concept of the uncanny has been "used" performed, theorised and applied - in the twentieth century, be it in theory, in
criticism and in art.
In "A Trail of Disorientation" Michiel Scharp has extensively compared Freud's and
Sarah Kofman's readings of Hoffmann's seminal story "Der Sandmann", ultimately
bringing the uncanny home to the story itself and to the essay that led Freud to
Hoffmann, Ernst Jentsch's "On the Psychology of the Uncanny", in which the notion
of doubt or intellectual uncertainty was posited as one of the main sources of the
uncanny. Pieter Borghart and Christophe Madelein have undertaken a similar
endeavour for another important aspect of the current concept of the uncanny in
literary theory, its relation to the fantastic, as it has been developed in Tzvetan
Todorov's study of the fantastic. They posit a structural relation between the
uncanny and the fantastic, which hinges on the notion of hesitation. They conclude
their elaboration with a brief reading of Adam Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's "Vra" in order
to draw attention to some of the ambiguities in Todorov's theoretical model. Alex de
Meulenaere follows the trail of the uncanny in the work of another French thinker,
Michel de Certeau, who has dealt with the relation between historiography and
psychoanalysis. Certeau's punning use of signifiers that play on the French term
"inquitante tranget" is symptomatic for his questioning of stable concepts and fits
in with a proposal for a different kind of historiography.
Anthony Vidler has successfully introduced the concept of the uncanny in the
deconstructive theory of architecture, renaming it as "the unhomely". In his survey
of various architects discussed by Vidler, Bart Van der Straeten examines how the
concept of the uncanny has, in some cases very explicitly, shaped the practices and
realisations of a number of the most important representatives of the deconstructive
movement in architecture: Bernard Tschumi, Peter Eisenman, Coop Himmelblau and
Daniel Libeskind. In "Exploration # 6", Nele Bemong analyses Mark Danielewski's
cult novel House of Leaves, a post-modern experiment, not only because of its
intricate plot and radical formal experiment, but also because of its radically selfreflexive and meta-literary character. Incorporating many references, both to real
and fictional theoretical works, the theory of the uncanny plays an important role in
the novel. Starting from the uncanny, Bemong presents a post-Lacanian
psychoanalytic reading of the novel addressing themes like feminity and the death
drive.
The link between the uncanny and (post-)Lacanian has also proved fruitful in a
number of critical approaches to works of art, especially in the case of film theory.
Joyce Huntjens offers a "close viewing" of Hitchcock's classic Vertigo focussing on
the relation between the protagonist John Ferguson and Madeleine/Judy in which the
uncanny is related to the Lacanian conception of "the Woman" and the "object a".
Maarten de Pourcq tackles Zizek's reading of another masterpiece of the
cinematographic uncanny, David Lynch's Lost Highway in order to critically examine
if and where the notion of the "object a" can be located in the film. Lost Highway is
also juxtaposed to the Greek tragedy Medea in which the complex notion of "oikos"
or home is examined. Both Trees Depoorter and Laurens de Vos have turned to
Greek cultural history as well. They offer divergent perspectives on a motive that
has often been associated with the uncanny: the snake-head Medusa, who with her
deadly gaze petrifies the beholder.10 Trees Depoorter tackles the question from a
philosophical perspective, trying to analyse Medusa both as an art-historical motive
and as an experience. The "Medusa-experience" is characterised in two ways: as
frontality and as detour, and as such it is related to other concepts, like
"suddenness", "immediacy" and metaphor. Laurens de Vos takes Freud's analysis of
"Das Medusenhaupt" as his starting point and stresses the ambiguity of Medusa.

After an excursion to mythology, he brings the motive home to a novel by Harry

Mulisch, The Procedure, where it is intricately linked to another traditional literary
motive, the golem. The last contribution of this issue, Lisa Copin's "Looking Inside
Out", offers an analysis of the problem of vision in Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's
graphic novel From Hell. The problem of vision and the gaze guides not merely the
analysis of the story and the graphic realisation of the novel, it is also examined
from a psychoanalytical perspective, in the terms of the relation of the subject to the
outside world.

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Oxford: Blackwell.

Footnotes
1. The seminars were taught in collaboration with Prof. D. de Geest within the interuniversity programme on literary theory, the GGS Literatuurwetenschap, in 20002001 and 2001-2002. I would also like to thank Michael Boyden for his help in
editing a few papers in this issue.
2. This has been further elaborated in my Mosaic-article (2002).
3. As Cixous puts it, "Freud declares that it is certain that the use of the Unheimliche
is uncertain. The indefiniteness is part and parcel of the "concept." The statement
and its enunciation become rejoined or reunited. The statement cannot be encircled:
yet Freud, arguing for the existence of the Unheimliche, wishes to retain the sense,
the real, the reality of the sense of things. He thus seeks out "the basic sense". Thus
the analysis is anchored, at once, in what is denoted. And it is a question of a
concept whose entire denotation is a connotation". (Cixous: 528)
4. Weber explains "why the notion has remained marginal even to psychoanalysis
itself. For psychoanalysis, today as to the time of Freud, has always sought to
establish itself in stable institutions, grounded both in a practice and in a theory that
rarely question the criteria of truth and value that dominate the societies in which it
is situated."
5. See for instance Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts (A.P.A, 1990) and Elizabeth
Wright's Feminism and Psychoanalysis: a critical dictionary (1992)
6. "Fiction is connected to life's economy by a link as undeniable and ambiguous as
that which passes from the Unheimliche to the Heimliche: it is not unreal; it its the
"fictional reality" and the vibration of reality." (Cixous: 546)
7. "If we experience uneasiness in reading Freud's essay, it is because the author is
his double in a game that cannot be dissociated from his own text: it is such that he
manages to escape at every turn of the phrase. It is also and especially because the
Unheimliche refers to no more profound secret than itself: every pursuit produces its
own cancellation () "Basically" Freud's adventure in this text is consecrated to the
very paradox of the writing which stretches its signs in order to "manifest" the secret
that it "contains"." (Cixous: 547)
8. "But we know that the relation between figurative language and what it figures
cannot be adequately grasped in metaphors of vision; and we might well doubt that
the forces of repetition can be isolated - even ideally - from that-which-is-repeated.
The wishfulness inherent in the model is not simply in isolating the forces of
repetition from their representations, but in seeking to isolate the question of
repetition from the use of figurative language itself." (Hertz: 320)
9. On the question of priority: see Hertz, Nobus and Morlock, who put forward
Jentsch as another possible "origin" of the concept. Another candidate might be
Schelling, but Vidler has demonstrated that Schelling's use of the term was never
conceptual. Although the question of origin and priority is an interesting debate, it
does not really significantly change the debate and the fact remains that in general,
the concept is attributed to Freud.
10. See for instance the word of Clair, Coates and Lloyd-Smith.

Anneleen Masschelein has recently finished her Ph.D on the conceptualization of the
Freudian uncanny in 20th-century theory and is currently employed at the
department of literary theory at the K.U.Leuven. She is teaching seminars on literary
theory and on psychoanalysis and literature. She has published on the uncanny, film,
Julia Kristeva etc.

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