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Freud's philosophy of the

uncanny
a
Fredrik Svenaeus
a
Department of Health and Society ,
University of Linköping , S-581 83,
Linköping , Sweden
Published online: 21 Jan 2013.

To cite this article: Fredrik Svenaeus (1999) Freud's philosophy of the

uncanny, The Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review, 22:2, 239-254, DOI:
10.1080/01062301.1999.10592708

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01062301.1999.10592708

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Freud's philosophy of the uncanny

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Fredrik Svenaeus

This paper is an attempt to uncover and bring to a coherent interpretation

Freud's thoughts on the phenomenon of uncanniness. Starting out with the
essay "The uncanny" the author wants to show that uncanniness plays an
important role in the turn that Freud's thinking goes through at this time,
and that the concept can serve as a springboard for a critical, phenomeno-
logical reading of Freud's thoughts on the development of the ego. The
analysis of the phenomenon of uncanniness itself tends to disrupt the coher-
ence of Freud's earlier views and pushes him towards his later thinking.
"Unheimlich" in German has the double meaning of uncanny and unhome-
like, and what is not at home in itself in an uncanny sense, according to
Freud, is precisely the human ego. Freud in "The uncanny" links the inter-
pretation of uncanniness to compulsive repetition and thus makes the connec-
tion to trauma and birth anxiety discussed in later works such as "Beyond
the pleasure principle" and "Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety". The origin
of our general sensitivity to the uncanny is thus, according to Freud, the loss
of the mother suffered by the child as a kind of a priori traumatic experience,
which is also the very event that makes the child into an ego. The under-
standing of traumatic neurosis and other forms of mental illness is conse-
quently linked to an analysis of this primal uncanniness of life.

THE UNCANNY

In his essay from 1919, "The uncanny" ("Das Unheimliche"), Sigmund

Freud tries to isolate the phenomenon of uncanniness as a delimited zone
"within that which is fearful (innerhalb des Angstlichen)" (p. 219)*. The
* All page references in this text are to the English translations of Freud's works. All
translations have, however, been checked against the German originals and have also
often been revised.

239
 uncanny gives rise to anxiety, but, as Freud says, not everything, that
causes dread and fear is uncanny. Freud proceeds in his analysis on two
main paths: the first being an historical, etymological analysis of the
meaning of the word "unheimlich"; and the second, what one might call
an aesthetic analysis, by which Freud makes use of art in order to get a
grasp of the phenomenon in question. In addition to this, in characteristic
manner, Freud intersperses the essay with a variety of examples from
psychoanalysis. Therefore, the essay not only contains interesting reflec-
tions upon the nature of the uncanny, but also, in its richness, provides a
point of entry into most themes of Freud's metapsychological theory. The
structure of "The uncanny" is, however, far from clear and simple, most
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themes are only hinted at, some will not be further elaborated upon until
Freud's later work, and the essay progresses from theme to theme by leaps
and bounds, first sketching solutions to problems that are, at the next
moment, abruptly abandoned. This very richness and work-in-progress
structure seem to me to support the assumption that the phenomenon of
Unheimlichkeit is really a key concept in Freud's theory, even though he
did not come to fully appreciate this insight himself.
In German, there is a phonetic similarity between "unheimlich" and
"unheimisch" - which would mean "unhomelike" - that is lost in the
English translation of the former to "uncanny". Freud, by consulting ety-
mological dictionaries, shows how this similarity is explained by the com-
mon roots of the two words "heimlich" and "heimisch". "Heimlich" in-
deed comes from "heimelich" - meaning homelike or that which belongs
to the home, "zum Haus" - and still means this in modern German. But
this aspect of keeping within the walls of one's own house also produced
a second meaning of "heimlich"- that of "geheim", signifying that which
is hidden from the stranger. Thus the two meanings of "homelike" and
"secret" were combined in "heimlich", rendering it an ambivalent concept,
or, if you will, a concept allowing two different perspectives: what is at
home for me is strange and unknown to you who are not allowed into my
house. The second meaning of "heimlich" - "secret" - also came to take
on the meaning of something uncanny in the sense of incomprehensible,
something that is dangerous and strange and ought to remain hidden. In
this process, the word acquired a meaning exactly the opposite of "home-
like" and was thus adjoined with a negative prefix, transforming "heim-
lich" into "unheimlich". The phonetic similarity between "unheimlich"
and "unheimisch" is therefore a similarity of importance, the first word
bearing within itself historical traces of the meaning of the second.

240
 Now, in what way can this insight help us in characterising "das Un-
heimliche" as a special region of the fearful? Freud does not immediately
answer this question but instead turns to the short story The Sandman by
E. T. A. Hoffmann:

This fantastic tale begins with the childhood-recollections of the stu-

dent Nathaniel: in spite of his present happiness, he cannot banish the
memories associated with the mysterious and terrifying death of the
father he loved. On certain evenings, his mother used to send the
children to bed early, warning that "the sandman was coming"; and
sure enough Nathaniel would not fail to hear the heavy tread of a
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visitor with whom his father would then be occupied that evening.
When questioned about the sandman, his mother, it is true, denied that
such a person existed except as a form of speech; but his nurse could
give him more definite information: "He is 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 moon to feed his children"
(pp. 227-228).

One evening, when the sandman is expected, Nathaniel hides himself in

his father's study and recognizes the visitor as Coppelius, a repulsive lawyer
and friend of his father of whom the children are frightened. His father and
the guest conduct experiments at the glowing fire-place and Nathaniel hears
Coppelius calling out to his father: "Here with your eyes!". At this point, the
child is terrified and betrays himself by screaming aloud. Coppelius, furious
at the sight of the intruder, seizes Nathaniel and is about to tear out the
child's eyes on to the hearth, but the father begs him not to, and saves Na-
thaniel. One year later, Nathaniel's father, while engaged in similar experi-
ments together with Coppelius, is killed by an explosion in his study, but the
lawyer vanishes from the scene without leaving a trace behind.
Hoffmann's story contains several features that are "unheimlich", the two
main ones being the characters Coppelius and Olimpia. Coppelius is the
daemonic lawyer engaged in Frankensteinian experiments involving the vi-
olent extraction of children's eyes, and Olimpia is a kind of automaton
fashioned by Coppelius with human eyes. Why are these figures uncanny?
Freud in citing a paper by E. Jentsch first gives a preliminary answer:

In telling a story, one of the most successful devices for easily creating
uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particu-
lar figure in the story is a human being or an automaton (p. 227).

241
 The uncanniness would thus seem to relate to the possibility of some-
thing dead being alive, or conversely, of something living being controlled
by mechanical, "dead" processes. The whole argument, of course, depends
on a dualistic position according to which the "aliveness" of human beings
consists in being animated, in having a soul, "beseelt sei". This notion
would explain the uncanniness of Olimpia. The student Nathaniel falls in
love with the automaton, only to realize afterwards, to his dismay, that
she is not alive, but has been constructed and animated by the two evil
figures, Coppola (Coppelius) and Spalanzani, who have given the wooden
doll human eyes.
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However, Freud is not satisfied with this answer. The truly uncanny
character in Hoffmann's story is not Olimpia but Coppelius - the sand-
man - who steals children's eyes away when they are going to sleep:

This short summary leaves, I think, no doubt that the feeling of some-
thing uncanny is directly attached to the figure of the sandman, 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 this effect. Uncertainty
whether an object is living or inanimate, which we must admit in regard
to the doll Olimpia, is quite irrelevant in connection with this other,
more striking instance of uncanniness (p. 230).

Freud's own interpretation of the story rests quite heavily on his theory
of the Oedipus complex and the fear of castration (Kastrationsangst),
which every child is thought to experience while passing through the third,
phallic stage of development, only to repress it immediately afterwards.
The fear of losing one's eyes is a metaphor and a substitute for the fear
of losing the penis, a metaphor consecrated by Oedipus himself when he
pokes out his eyes after having learned of the terrible crimes he had un-
knowingly and unwillingly committed: killing his father and going to bed
with his mother. Coppelius is, according to Freud, the substitute or double
of the father that Nathaniel fears will cut off his penis because of his
secret wishes to unite with the mother.
It would take us too far away from the uncanny if we were to discuss
the credibility of Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex. Leaving this
point aside, it seems to me nevertheless obvious that Freud too hastily
abandons the interesting hypothesis of Jentsch, which has served as his
starting point in the essay. Whether or not Oedipus' blinding of himself is
a substitute for castration, the act clearly seems connected to the fear and
desire of not knowing (Ricoeur, 1970 p. 516fT.). To know is to see with

242
 the eye of the mind as the blind seer Tiresias makes clear in the play. The
reason why Oedipus blinds himself is that he - the king who ought to
possess great knowledge of the state of things - did not even know himself.
If the uncanny is an uncertainty which concerns the animatedness of a
thing, then Nathaniel's fear for his eyes is precisely a fear of not knowing,
of not seeing how things really are. Freud might be right in pointing out
that the doll Olimpia is not really uncanny.* The reason for this, however,
is not the absence of a fear of castration, but rather the fact that Nathaniel
never really wonders whether she is a woman or a machine. He finds out
all of a sudden, in a shocking event, that she is a doll. He never wonders
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whether she is dead or alive; he first assumes that she is alive and then
suddenly learns that she is not. Olimpia would have been truly uncanny
in the story if Nathaniel had come to wonder whether she was an automa-
ton or a living person, especially if this uncertainty had announced itself
in an "unconscious" way - that is, by a certain feeling that something was
not "right" with her, that she was alive but still at the same time had a
graspless quality of the mechanical and dead. Conversely, a robot is not
uncanny if we know that it is a robot. It would only be uncanny if so well
made that we could not really believe it to be a robot anymore, but still
knew it to be a robot. The uncanny, as Jentsch points out, is produced by
this kind of doubt announcing itself in an indiscernible way.
Why then is Coppelius uncanny whereas Olimpia is not? The uncanni-
ness of Coppelius seems to come precisely from the uncertainty regarding
his identity. He seems to assume the identity of three different characters
at the same time in the story: the sandman, Coppelius the lawyer, and
Coppola the optician. Nathaniel (as well as the reader) is held in constant
uncertainty as to whether these three characters are really one and the
same (and whether they do not all in fact hide something of a daemonic
origin). Along with this multiple personality, Coppelius is also the one
who administers animation and inanimation. It appears as though the

* He, however, neglects to mention that Hoffmann himself, in his short story, uses the
word "unheimlich" concerning Olimpia (and only concerning her) (Hoffmann 1957, pp.
17, 34). The first time the word is used, it is Nathaniel who feels uncanny watching
Olimpia; and the second time, his friend Siegmund (!) uses the word in describing what
he thinks is a general impression about her. Another important fact that Freud leaves
out in his summary of the short story is that the reason Nathaniel falls in love with
Olimpia and comes to think she is not uncanny, when everybody else thinks she is,
is that he watches her through a magic telescope that he has bought from Coppola
(Coppelius).

243
 eyes are the seat of the soul in Hoffmann's story, since it is the eyes that
animate the doll Olimpia - the very eyes that Spalanzani claims Coppelius
has stolen from Nathaniel and which he throws at him when the latter
surprises the two "scientist-magicians" in their workshop with the wooden
doll. That Nathaniel finally goes insane and throws himself from a tower
seems to be the result of his growing incertainty concerning the identity
of the persons around him. Is his girlfriend Clara not also in actuality a
wooden doll? Is Coppola Coppelius? And is he (Nathaniel) indeed himself
anymore? Is he being controlled by Coppelius who possesses his "soul"
after having stolen his eyes and given him a telescope which bewitches his
gaze and thoughts? If the uncanny amounts to an uncertainty concerning
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the "animatedness" of a thing, then Nathaniel's fear in the story, it seems

to me, is precisely the fear of not seeing through one's own eyes any more.
Had Freud pursued his introductory, etymological analysis to its logical
end - instead of choosing to interpret Hoffmann's tale psychoanalytically,
in terms of castration, the penis being represented by the eyes - he would
doubtlessly have noticed the unhomelikeness, not only of Olimpia and
Coppelius, but of Nathaniel as well. The denouement of The Sandman is
clearly Nathaniel's doubts about being at home in himself. Is not really
Freud's metapsychological theory of the unconscious precisely a sophisti-
cated model for explaining how various phenomena make the individual
aware of not being at home in him- or herself? Something that belongs to
the person, but which is still not known by him or her, presents itself
in dreams and slips of the tongue. Neurosis essentially consists in being
controlled by impulses that one cannot master, but which are still parts
of oneself and formed by one's own history. The ego is not master in its
own house as Freud would later put it. The essay "The uncanny" interest-
ingly enough is situated at a point in Freud's thinking when he was re-
working his theories on the economics of the psyche. This change was not
to be completed until Freud had introduced the concept of the death drive
(Thanatos) in "Beyond the pleasure principle" in 1920, added the new
topography of the agencies ego, id and superego to the earlier one of the
systems of the conscious, the preconscious and the unconscious in "The
ego and the id" in 1923, and discussed trauma, the nature of defence and
anxiety in 1926 in "Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety". Precursors of
many later themes are, as we will see, already present in "The uncanny".
One could indeed claim that the analysis of the phenomenon of uncanni-
ness itself tends to disrupt the coherency of his earlier views and pushes
him towards his later thinking.

244
 One reason for Freud's reluctance to link the etymological analysis to
Jentsch's hypothesis is undoubtedly the dualistic position that results from
discussing animate and inanimate beings. That the soul lives in the body
as if in a house and can be either at home or absent is not a feasible
alternative for Freud, anymore than for any modern scientist or philos-
opher. But is it necessary to understand the unhomelike quality belonging
to the uncanny experience in this way? I think not, and Freud, having
rejected Jentsch's hypothesis, cannot resist returning to the phenomenon
of the living doll and the "double" (der Doppelganger) in Hoffmann's
stories. The identity of the self is questioned by the latter phenomenon
and this is why it is uncanny.
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Hoffmann accentuates this relation by transferring mental processes

(seelischer Vorgange) from the one person to the other - what we
should call telepathy - so that the one possesses knowledge, feeling and
experience in common with the other, identifies himself with another
person, so that his self becomes confounded (so dass man an seinem
Ich irre wird), or the foreign self is substituted for his own - in other
words, by doubling, dividing and interchanging the self (p. 234).

In the essay, Freud gives this uncanny phenomenon a distinct place in

the drama of castration. The double is interpreted as a prototype of what
will, later in Freud's thinking, be known as the superego: the call of con-
science which is the introjected law and threat of the father, a self-observ-
ing instance, a double within that watches the ego. Interestingly enough,
however, immediately after offering this interpretation of the double, he
makes the following disclaimer:

But, after having thus considered the manifest motivation of the figure
of a "double", we have to admit to ourselves that none of it helps us to
understand the extraordinarily strong feeling of something uncanny that
pervades the conception; and our knowledge of pathological mental pro-
cesses enables us to add that nothing of all this could account for that
striving of defence which has caused the ego to project such a content (the
double) outward as something foreign to itself. The quality of uncanni-
ness can only come from the circumstance of the "double" being a cre-
ation dating back to a very early mental stage long since left behind (eine
den iiberwundenen seelischen Urzeiten angehOrige Bildung ist), and one,
no doubt, in which it wore a more friendly aspect (p. 236).

The experience of the uncanny seems to point back to something that

took place long before the ego experienced and repressed castration

245
 anxiety. It points back to something that is before the time of the ego since
"the ego had not yet sharply differentiated itself from the external world
and from other persons" (p. 236)*. We will return to this uncanny "birth
anxiety" shortly, in broadening our perspective to include other works
by Freud than "The uncanny" but first we need to consider yet another
characteristic of the uncanny to which Freud next turns in the essay: invol-
untary repetition.
Freud, in "The uncanny", tells us about an uncanny experience he had
while visiting a small town in Italy. Walking around the labyrinthine, de-
serted streets he suddenly came to a place where the windows were filled
with ladies wearing heavy make-up. Feeling uncomfortable, he rushed
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away, only to find that, in his efforts to get away, he always after a brief
interlude returned to the same place, where his presence now began to
excite attention. The third time he involuntarily returned to the street, a
feeling of distinct uncanniness came over him. Freud now claims that the
uncanniness in this and similar situations comes from the "involuntary
return to the same situation (unbeabsichtige Wiederkehr)" (p. 237). After
describing similar instances of this strange "return to the same", Freud
writes:

How exactly we can trace back the uncanny effect of such recurrent
similarities to the infantile life of the mind (infantilen Seelenleben) is a
question I can only lightly touch upon here; and I must refer the reader
instead to another pamphlet, now ready for publication, in which this
has been gone into in detail, but in a very different connection. It must
be explained how we are able to postulate the principle (Herrschaft) of
a repetition compulsion ( Wiederholungszwang) in the unconscious mind,
based upon instinctual activity and probably inherent in the very nature
of the instincts - a principle powerful enough to overrule the pleasure-
principle, lending to certain aspects of the mind their daemonic charac-
ter (p. 238).

The daemonic character of repetition in "The uncanny" seems to come

from the compulsiveness of the repetition itself, not from the situation or
phenomenon that is repeated. Even something innocent would, if incess-
antly repeated, be uncanny if we felt that we could not control the rep-
* The German term "Ich" can be translated both as the everyday "I'' and as the more
technical "ego", which has been used in English translations to indicate a topographical
meaning of the term in Freud's writings which I have not discussed here. This theory of
the ego was already present, inchoately, in "The uncanny", but it was not formulated
explicitly until four years later in "The ego and the id".

246
 etition. The uncanniness, I would suggest, comes from this feeling of lack
of control, of not being at home, of being controlled by someone or some-
thing other than oneself. The repetition itself could be viewed as a mech-
anical, unfamiliar principle regulating the self beyond its possible control
and comprehension.

TRAUMA

The pamphlet that Freud is referring to in the quotation above is "Beyond

the pleasure principle", which was published a year later (1920). In this
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work the death drive (Todestrieb) is introduced in order to account for

"daemonic" phenomena, like the one mentioned above. Since the initial
aim of this book is to focus upon phenomena that seem to be beyond the
pleasure principle (beyond wish fulfilment) focus is placed on the rep-
etition of painful experiences. Traumatic neurosis is the name that Freud
gives to the compulsive repetition of something painful, a phenomenon
which had come to the attention of Freud and his contemporaries through
the ailments of soldiers who had suffered severe shocks during the First
World War. In their dreams, they were repeatedly taken back to the scene
of the traumatic experience, a scene which they seemed to have forgotten
or which, at least, did not seem to occupy their conscious, waking
thoughts.* "This", Freud writes, "astonishes people far too little" (p. 11 ).
The reason why Freud finds it astonishing is that the primary processes
that are set free in dreams should, according to his earlier theory, serve
wish fulfilment and not bring about pain. Yet, a destructive instinct (Trieb)
in the psyche seems to be at work in these dreams.
In discussing the neuroses of war veterans, Freud makes some import-
ant distinctions that will serve us well in this paper on the uncanny:

"Fright" (Schreck), "fear" (Furcht) and "anxiety" (Angst) are im-

properly used as synonymous expressions; they are in fact capable of
clear distinction in their relation to danger. "Anxiety" describes a par-
ticular state of expecting the danger and preparing for it, even though
it may be an unknown one. "Fear" requires a definite object of which
to be afraid. "Fright", however, is the name we give to the state a
person gets into when he has run into danger without being prepared
for it; it emphasizes the factor of surprise (p. 11 ).

*In "The uncanny", Freud makes a reference to dreams as a basic source ofthe uncanny
due to the helplessness sometimes experienced in them.

247
 The soldiers have been exposed to fright - to a danger which it was
impossible to prepare for since it was unimaginable, ungraspable. In their
dreams, they involuntarily return to this danger - but this time they are
prepared, i.e., in a state of anxiety. The dream seems to be an attempt to
prepare by means of anxiety for a danger which could not be prepared for
at the time when it took place.
The "warfare-electro-economic" explanation of the trauma that Freud
gives in "Beyond the pleasure principle" cannot concern us in detail here.
It operates on the level of stimuli or energy, breaching the protective shield
of the organism in a manner which makes it impossible to control or
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bind the energy. An explication of the language and theory of instinctual

representative (Triebrepriisentant), cathexis (Besetzung) and discharge
(Abfuhr) would require a lengthy discussion which there is no room for
here. I will not, however, deny that one of my reasons for not focussing
on this central part of Freud's theory is that I find it hard to defend,
especially when it comes to the phenomenology of feelings. The feeling of
the uncanny cannot, I think, be grasped in a quantitative language of
pleasure and pain modelled mainly on neuro-physiology and the male sex
drive.* Electro-chemical discharge of neurones and ejaculation seem to be
the two main sources for Freud's electro-economic theory of the psyche.
Given Freud's reduction of Thanatos to the mere economic play of ener-
gies, I doubt that his theory of the death drive can provide us with a
satisfactory explanation of the uncanny.
There is, however, another aspect of Freud's discussion of trauma which
I would like to focus on here. It concerns the famous "fort-da" game
played by Freud's grandson in the second chapter of "Beyond the pleasure
principle". The child plays a game in which he throws a toy to a place
where he cannot see it, thereupon saying "fort" (or actually "ooo" which
Freud interprets as "fort" - "gone"). Thereafter, by a piece of string at-
tached to the toy, he pulls it back again and utters a joyful "da" ("there").
Freud's interpretation of this game, which the child plays over and over
again, is that it is an attempt to master a painful loss - the loss of the
mother who has left the child alone. It is therefore an example of wishful
thinking, a way of mastering the world by one's own thoughts. The mother
did not really go - I sent her away and I can call her back again whenever
I want.

* See "Project for a scientific psychology" published posthumously, but written as early
as 1895 and containing the origins of Freud's model of the mind.

248
 This repetition does not seem to be compulsive - rather, the child plays
the game by himself because he wants to. Freud discusses other games,
and remarks that children repeat anything in life that make a strong im-
pression on them in order to master situations and be like grown-ups.
These games can include painful experiences (like going to the doctor),
but, since the goal of these games is the mastery, in itself pleasurable, of
a certain situation, it is not necessary to posit a compulsive, repetitive
drive "beyond the pleasure principle" to explain them.
In limiting his perspective here to the framework of the pleasure prin-
ciple and possible mechanisms at work beyond it, I think Freud misses an
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important point. His grandson's game makes an uncanny impression in a

way that most playing children do not. The little boy seems closed off
from the outer world in an autistic way in the repetitive "fort und da". He
seems almost obsessed by this game which he plays by himself without
any other participants. The normal variant of this game (Freud indeed
refers to the game as "normal" in contrast to the traumatic neurosis on p.
12)* would really be the m~ther hiding her face and then uncovering it
again to the child. This is a game played by the mother and the child
together, and it is a game played for the express purpose of teaching the
child that the mother will not be gone forever when she leaves, but will
instead return after a while. According to the text, Freud does not make
any attempts to join in the game. He watches day after day fascinated by
his grandson's activities. Is it not possible that this fascination came pre-
cisely from an uncanny feeling aroused in him by the playing boy?** This
uncanniness would - and I will elaborate upon this shortly - have its
source in a feeling of homelessness and loss experienced very early in life.
It would be something like a universal trauma that has left deeper scars
in some than in others.

* See Jacques Derrida (1987, p. 320fT.) and Paul Ricoeur (1970, p. 285fT.) for interesting
discussions of Freud's interpretation of the game and of the "normality" of both game
and interpretation.
** The feeling of uncanniness is increased by the footnote added to the text on page 16.
It states that when the child was 5-years-old, his mother died. Now she (Freud's daugh-
ter) "was really 'gone' ('ooo')". One of the instances of the uncanny that Freud discusses
in "The uncanny" is when one's secret wishes are coming true. This is uncanny because
it takes us back to a stage in childhood when we really thought that we could control
the world with our wishes, a stage we have not quite left. Considering the fact that
Freud wrote "Beyond the pleasure principle" before the death of his daughter Sophie
(editor's introduction on p. xxiii), this "coincidence" of the child's "ooo" and the
mother's death is really uncanny.

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 ANXIETY AND LOSS

We have come to discuss the uncanny in terms of trauma and anxiety.

Freud himself incited us to make this transition by interpreting the un-
canny in terms of involuntary repetition. The uncanny anxiety "comes
from something repressed which recurs" (p. 241 ). What is it then that
recurs? Given that we are all more-or-less sensitive to things that evoke
uncanny feelings, it must be some kind of universal trauma. Yet that
which returns in the feeling is something unknown, a threat coming
from "nowhere", or at least from a "place" we do not know in our
selves. What if the repressed which recurs in uncanny anxiety is some-
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thing that was once the most familiar and which has now through the
process of repression become the most estranged? What if it has to do
with the most basic loss there is - the loss of the first object, the mother,
or rather the loss of that stage in existence during which there was not
yet an ego but only a symbiosis with her?* A passage from "The un-
canny" confirms this interpretation:

It often happens that male patients declare that they feel there is some-
thing uncanny about the female genital organs. This unhomelike (un-
heimlich) place, however, is the entrance to the former home (heim) of
all human beings, to the place where everyone dwelt once upon a time
and in the beginning. [... ]the unhomelike (unheimlich) is what was once
homelike (heimisch) and familiar; the prefix "un" on this world is how-
ever the token of repression (p. 245).

What I find remarkable in this passage is exactly the absence of any

reference to castration anxiety. One would imagine, given Freud's earlier
interpretation of the uncanny in the essay, that the female genitals
would offer a perfect opportunity for yet another interpretation of the
uncanny in terms of castration. Yet Freud resists this and I think he
is perfectly right in doing so. Rather than interpreting all fears of loss
in terms of fear of castration - as Freud often does, and, as we have
seen, "The uncanny" is no exception here - it would be more reason-

* A possible path on which to continue this critical reading of Freud are the works
of Melanie Klein, as well as other works from the analysts of the so called object-
relationship schools. Psychoanalysts have indeed critisised Freud on most of the
points I call attention to in this paper. My claim for originality concerns only the
way I use Freud to find a way towards a phenomenology of mental illness proceeding
from Unheimlichkeit.

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 able to regard castration as one possible loss among others, the most
primitive and important loss being rather the loss of the mother. This
is, of course, my own, unproven claim. Freud obviously thought that
analytical experience taught him otherwise. Yet I think that the uncanny
(unhomelike) quality of some neurotic anxiety (as well as other "nor-
mal" instances of the uncanny) is a sign pointing in the direction of
the mother's lap rather than the father's knife.
The different characteristics and sources of the uncanny which Freud
enumerates in "The uncanny" are never brought together in any coher-
ent way in the essay. My attempt has been to find unity by stressing
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some of the points he makes more than others and providing support-
ing evidence from other works. The very last lines, which follow a
lengthy discussion of the techniques of evoking the uncanny in litera-
ture, brings the essay to a rather abrupt conclusion:

Concerning the factors of solitude, silence and darkness (which can

evoke the uncanny), we can only say that they are actually elements in
the production of that infantile morbid anxiety from which the ma-
jority of human beings have never become quite free. This problem
has been discussed from a psychoanalytical point of view elsewhere (p.
252).

I do not know which work Freud is referring to here. The book by

Freud himself which would best fit the description was not published until
seven years later. I am thinking of "Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety"
which bears resemblance to "The uncanny" in terms of a rather undisci-
plined structure. Both works give the appearance of having been written
for the author himself in the process of thinking things through. They
present us with hypotheses and questions rather than with finished theor-
ies and answers.
One of the themes brought up in "Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety"
is birth anxiety. Freud criticizes a work by Otto Rank claiming that the
trauma of birth is the origin of neurosis (pp. 82-89). (Actually another
book by Rank figures quite heavily in "The uncanny": Der Doppelgang-
er). This hypothesis, Freud says, lacks empirical grounding, and, what
is worse, it "contradicts the aetiological importance of the sexual in-
stincts as hitherto recognized by psychoanalysis" (p. 85). However, in
discussing the anxiety of small children in the book, Freud nevertheless
stresses the importance of what one might term a second birth - the
birth of the ego out of a symbiosis with the mother (p. 66 fT., p. 105

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 ff.). The pain of being left alone (silence, solitude, darkness) is equivalent
to the trauma of uncontrollable fright (suffered for instance in war neur-
osis). This a priori trauma not only brings about repetition in the sense
that a similar situation will again give rise to anxiety as an attempt to
prepare for the danger; it also actually gives birth to the ego, since the
child comes to recognize its dependence on the mother through this pro-
cess. The mother will be constituted, "cathected" in Freud's terms, as
something other than the child - something which most often satisfies
the wishes of the child but which can also desert it. The radical Unheim-
lichkeit of this situation (in the double sense of uncanny and unhome-
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like) is the very quality that makes the child into an ego - an ego that
will never be (and indeed as an ego never was) quite at home. The child
will forever be sensitive to this a priori homelessness of existence which
will announce itself in the uncanny. This uncanniness, which we all
share, most often lurks in the background, in what Freud would call
the unconscious. The homelessness will, however, on certain occasions,
break through and make us shiver. Reading E. T. A. Hoffmann may be
one such occasion, traumatic neurosis another.
My use of the phenomenological term "constitution" above is quite
deliberate. Freud's choice of the economical language of cathexis here
seems highly problematic and insufficient to me when it comes to feel-
ings. One may ask oneself if this quasi-quantitative electromechanics is
indeed not on the verge of breaking down in "Inhibitions, symptoms
and anxiety" and other late works. On pp. 107 and 108 Freud writes
of the "home-longing" (sehnziichtig) cathexis of child anxiety. But how
could a "Besetzung" of an object with energy be "longing"? In contrast
to what other cathexis and in terms of which quantitative relationships?
It seems like the only thing a quantitative scale of energy could explain
would be different intensities of "wanting" an object. The quality of dif-
ferent kinds of wanting like longing and loving would hardly be express-
ible therein. Freud's own attempts to add qualities to the neutral energy
by means of Eros and Thanatos in "The ego and the id" (p. 42) is hard
to grasp. If tension is pain and discharge is pleasure, how could hate
and love be added to this mechanism? To love is not only to be satisfied
and to hate is not only to avoid pain, as Freud himself is acutely aware
of in this book.
We might here indeed be interpreting Freud against his own wishes
and beyond his own horizons. Nevertheless, the kind of phenomenological
reading of his work I have attempted above, serves to uncover central

252
 aspects of his thinking. The a priori homelessness of life, highlighted by
the phenomenon of Unheimlichkeit, is a central concept in, for instance,
the phenomenologies of Heidegger and Levinas worked out in Sein und
Zeit (1927) and Totalite et infini (1961), respectively. Freud thought of this
basic, uncanny unhomelikeness of life in terms of processes working in
our mind beyond conscious control. No one will ever fully know himself,
since the mind is an opaque region - and necessarily so. To become a
human being means to be born to homelessness. This homelessness in
itself does not make us ill - it rather makes us human. If it becomes too
obtrusive, however, we will end up in illness. In following the track from
uncanny literature to trauma and birth anxiety, we have uncovered one
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such example in Freud. One might go on to argue that all types of neurotic
anxiety (and even pathological feelings other than anxiety, like melan-
cholia) would be uncanny in the sense of an experience of not being at
home in oneself.
Here, I will not attempt such an interpretation of the phenomenon of
mental illness itself in terms of Unheimlichkeit. Let me nevertheless end
this paper with a quotation from "The uncanny" which leads our thoughts
in this direction:

The uncanny effect of epilepsy and of madness has the same origin.
The ordinary person sees in them the workings of forces hitherto unsus-
pected in his fellow-man, but which at the same time he is dimly aware
of in a remote corner of his own being. The Middle Ages therefore
ascribed all such maladies to daemonic influences, and in this they were
psychologically almost correct. Indeed, I should not be surprised to
hear that psychoanalysis, which is concerned with laying bare these
hidden forces, has itself become uncanny to many people for that very
reason (p. 243).

REFERENCES

Derrida, J. (1987). The Post Card. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Freud, S. (1895). Project for a scientific psychology. S. E. l.
- - (1919). The "uncanny". S. E. 17.
- - (1920). Beyond the pleasure principle. S. E. 18.
- - (1923). The ego and the id. S. E. 19.
- - (1926). Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety. S. E. 20.
Heidegger, M. (1927). Sein und Zeit. 'IUbingen: Max Nimeyer, 1986.
Hoffmann, E. T. A. (1957). Der Sandmann. In: Poetische Werke Ill. Berlin: Walter de
Gruyer.

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 Levinas, E. (1961). Totalite et in.fini: essai sur l'exteriorite. LaHaye: NijhofT.
Ricoeur, P. (1970). Freud and Philosophy. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Fredrik Svenaeus
Department of Health and Society
University of Linkoping
S-581 83 Linkoping
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Sweden

Copyright © Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review. 1999

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