Freud - Complete Works (614 page)

The 'Uncanny'

3692

   It only remains for us to test
our new hypothesis on one or two more examples of the uncanny.

   Many people experience the
feeling in the highest degree in relation to death and dead bodies,
to the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts. As we have
seen some languages in use to-day can only render the German
expression ‘an
unheimlich
house’ by ‘a
haunted
house’. We might indeed have begun our
investigation with this example, perhaps the most striking of all,
of something uncanny, but we refrained from doing so because the
uncanny in it is too much intermixed with what is purely gruesome
and is in part overlaid by it. There is scarcely any other matter,
however, upon which our thoughts and feelings have changed so
little since the very earliest times, and in which discarded forms
have been so completely preserved under a thin disguise, as our
relation to death. Two things account for our conservatism: the
strength of our original emotional reaction to death and the
insufficiency of our scientific knowledge about it. Biology has not
yet been able to decide whether death is the inevitable fate of
every living being or whether it is only a regular but yet perhaps
avoidable event in life. It is true that the statement ‘All
men are mortal’ is paraded in text-books of logic as an
example of a general proposition; but no human being really grasps
it, and our unconscious has as little use now as it ever had for
the idea of its own mortality. Religions continue to dispute the
importance of the undeniable fact of individual death and to
postulate a life after death; civil governments still believe that
they cannot maintain moral order among the living if they do not
uphold the prospect of a better life hereafter as a recompense for
mundane existence. In our great cities, placards announce lectures
that undertake to tell us how to get into touch with the souls of
the departed; and it cannot be denied that not a few of the most
able and penetrating minds among our men of science have come to
the conclusion, especially towards the close of their own lives,
that a contact of this kind is not impossible. Since almost all of
us still think as savages do on this topic, it is no matter for
surprise that the primitive fear of the dead is still so strong
within us and always ready to come to the surface on any
provocation. Most likely our fear still implies the old belief that
the dead man becomes the enemy of his survivor and seeks to carry
him off to share his new life with him. Considering our unchanged
attitude towards death, we might rather enquire what has become of
the repression, which is the necessary condition of a primitive
feeling recurring in the shape of something uncanny. But repression
is there, too. All supposedly educated people have ceased to
believe officially that the dead can become visible as spirits, and
have made any such appearances dependent on improbable and remote
conditions; their emotional attitude towards their dead, moreover,
once a highly ambiguous and ambivalent one, has been toned down in
the higher strata of the mind into an unambiguous feeling of
piety.¹

  
¹
Cf.
Totem and Taboo
.

The 'Uncanny'

3693

   We have now only a few remarks to
add - for animism, magic and sorcery, the omnipotence of thoughts,
man’s attitude to death, involuntary repetition and the
castration complex comprise practically all the factors which turn
something frightening into something uncanny.

   We can also speak of a living
person as uncanny, and we do so when we ascribe evil intentions to
him. But that is not all; in addition to this we must feel that his
intentions to harm us are going to be carried out with the help of
special powers. A good instance of this is the
‘
Gettatore
’, that uncanny figure of Romanic
superstition which Schaeffer, with intuitive poetic feeling and
profound psycho-analytic understanding, has transformed into a
sympathetic character in his
Josef Montfort
. But the
question of these secret powers brings us back again to the realm
of animism. It was the pious Gretchen’s intuition that
Mephistopheles possessed secret powers of this kind that made him
so uncanny to her.

                                               
Sie fühlt dass ich ganz sicher ein Genie,

                                               
Vielleicht sogar der Teufel bin.
¹

   The uncanny effect of epilepsy
and of madness has the same origin. The layman sees in them the
working of forces hitherto unsuspected in his fellow-men, but at
the same time he is dimly aware of them in remote corners of his
own being. The Middle Ages quite consistently ascribed all such
maladies to the influence of demons, and in this their psychology
was almost correct. Indeed, I should not be surprised to hear that
psycho-analysis, which is concerned with laying bare these hidden
forces, has itself become uncanny to many people for that very
reason. In one case, after I had succeeded - though none too
rapidly - in effecting a cure in a girl who had been an invalid for
many years, I myself heard this view expressed by the
patient’s mother long after her recovery.

  
¹
[She feels that surely I’m a genius
now, -

      Perhaps the
very Devil indeed!]

The 'Uncanny'

3694

   Dismembered limbs, a severed
head, a hand cut off at the wrist, as in a fairy tale of
Hauff’s, feet which dance by themselves, as in the book by
Schaeffer which I mentioned above - all these have something
peculiarly uncanny about them, especially when, as in the last
instance, they prove capable of independent activity in addition.
As we already know, this kind of uncanniness springs from its
proximity to the castration complex. To some people the idea of
being buried alive by mistake is the most uncanny thing of all. And
yet psycho-analysis has taught us that this terrifying phantasy is
only a transformation of another phantasy which had originally
nothing terrifying about it at all, but was qualified by a certain
lasciviousness - the phantasy, I mean, of intra-uterine
existence.

   There is one more point of
general application which I should like to add, though, strictly
speaking, it has been included in what has already been said about
animism and modes of working of the mental apparatus that have been
surmounted; for I think it deserves special emphasis. This is that
an uncanny effect is often and easily produced when the distinction
between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that
we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in
reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions of the
thing it symbolizes, and so on. It is this factor which contributes
not a little to the uncanny effect attaching to magical practices.
The infantile element in this, which also dominates the minds of
neurotics, is the over-accentuation of psychical reality in
comparison with material reality - a feature closely allied to the
belief in the omnipotence of thoughts. In the middle of the
isolation of war-time a number of the English
Strand
Magazine
fell into my hands; and, among other somewhat
redundant matter, I read a story about a young married couple who
move into a furnished house in which there is a curiously shaped
table with carvings of crocodiles on it. Towards evening an
intolerable and very specific smell begins to pervade the house;
they stumble over something in the dark; they seem to see a vague
form gliding over the stairs - in short, we are given to understand
that the presence of the table causes ghostly crocodiles to haunt
the place, or that the wooden monsters come to life in the dark, or
something of the sort. It was a naïve enough story, but the
uncanny feeling it produced was quite remarkable.

   To conclude this collection of
examples, which is certainly not complete, I will relate an
instance taken from psycho-analytic experience; if it does not rest
upon mere coincidence, it furnishes a beautiful confirmation of our
theory of the uncanny. It often happens that neurotic men declare
that they feel there is something uncanny about the female genital
organs. This
unheimlich
place, however, is the entrance to
the former
Heim
of all human beings, to the place where each
one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning. There is a
joking saying that ‘Love is home-sickness’; and
whenever a man dreams of a place or a country and says to himself,
while he is still dreaming: ‘this place is familiar to me,
I’ve been here before’, we may interpret the place as
being his mother’s genitals or her body. In this case too,
then, the
unheimlich
is what was once
heimlich
,
familiar; the prefix ‘
un
’ is the token of
repression.

The 'Uncanny'

3695

III

   In the course of this discussion
the reader will have felt certain doubts arising in his mind; and
he must now have an opportunity of collecting them and bringing
them forward.

   It may be true that the uncanny
is something which is secretly familiar, which has undergone
repression and then returned from it, and that everything that is
uncanny fulfils this condition. But the selection of material on
this basis does not enable us to solve the problem of the uncanny.
For our proposition is clearly not convertible. Not everything that
fulfils this condition - not everything that recalls repressed
desires and surmounted modes of thinking belonging to the
prehistory of the individual and of the race - is on that account
uncanny.

   Nor shall we conceal the fact
that for almost every example adduced in support of our hypothesis
one may be found which rebuts it. The story of the severed hand in
Hauff’s fairy tale certainly has an uncanny effect, and we
have traced that effect back to the castration complex; but most
readers will probably agree with me in judging that no trace of
uncanniness is provoked by Herodotus’s story of the treasure
of Rhampsinitus, in which the master-thief, whom the princess tries
to hold fast by the hand, leaves his brother’s severed hand
behind with her instead. Again, the prompt fulfilment of the wishes
of Polycrates undoubtedly affects us in the same uncanny way as it
did the king of Egypt; yet our own fairy stories are crammed with
instantaneous wish-fulfilments which produce no uncanny effect
whatever. In the story of ‘The Three Wishes’, the woman
is tempted by the savoury smell of a sausage to wish that she might
have one too, and in an instant it lies on a plate before her. In
his annoyance at her hastiness her husband wishes it may hang on
her nose. And there it is, dangling from her nose. All this is very
striking but not in the least uncanny. Fairy tales quite frankly
adopt the animistic standpoint of the omnipotence of thoughts and
wishes, and yet I cannot think of any genuine fairy story which has
anything uncanny about it. We have heard that it is in the highest
degree uncanny when an inanimate object - a picture or a doll -
comes to life; nevertheless in Hans Andersen’s stories the
household utensils, furniture and tin soldiers are alive, yet
nothing could well be more remote from the uncanny. And we should
hardly call it uncanny when Pygmalion’s beautiful statue
comes to life.

The 'Uncanny'

3696

   Apparent death and the
re-animation of the dead have been represented as most uncanny
themes. But things of this sort too are very common in fairy
stories. Who would be so bold as to call it uncanny, for instance,
when Snow-White opens her eyes once more? And the resuscitation of
the dead in accounts of miracles, as in the New Testament, elicits
feelings quite unrelated to the uncanny. Then, too, the theme that
achieves such an indubitably uncanny effect, the unintended
recurrence of the same thing, serves other and quite different
purposes in another class of cases. We have already come across one
example in which it is employed to call up a feeling of the comic;
and we could multiply instances of this kind. Or again, it works as
a means of emphasis, and so on. And once more: what is the origin
of the uncanny effect of silence, darkness and solitude? Do not
these factors point to the part played by danger in the genesis of
what is uncanny, notwithstanding that in children these same
factors are the most frequent determinants of the expression of
fear? And are we after all justified in entirely ignoring
intellectual uncertainty as a factor, seeing that we have admitted
its importance in relation to death?

   It is evident therefore, that we
must be prepared to admit that there are other elements besides
those which we have so far laid down as determining the production
of uncanny feelings. We might say that these preliminary results
have satisfied
psycho-analytic
interest in the problem of
the uncanny, and that what remains probably calls for an
aesthetic
enquiry. But that would be to open the door to
doubts about what exactly is the value of our general contention
that the uncanny proceeds from something familiar which has been
repressed.

   We have noticed one point which
may help us to resolve these uncertainties: nearly all the
instances that contradict our hypothesis are taken from the realm
of fiction, of imaginative writing. This suggests that we should
differentiate between the uncanny that we actually experience and
the uncanny that we merely picture or read about.