The Uncanny

In Part 2 of his essay, Freud undertakes a lengthy reading of ETA Hoffmann’s short story “The Sandman,” which he considers an exemplar of uncanny effects. Before he begins his reading, he opens this section of the essay by examining Jentsch’s central example of something uncanny: confusion over “whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate” (135). For this reason, Jentsch asserts, dolls, automatons, and wax-works often produce uncanny effects in people.

Likewise, insane behavior appears uncanny because of the mechanical processes that lie behind it. Freud takes these examples of uncanniness as a starting point. Jentsch then takes up the theme of Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” which leaves the reader in doubt he says, as to whether the “figure in the story is a human being or an automaton” (135). Freud’s appraisal of Jentsch’s reading is that his observation is “undoubtedly a correct one” (135). He disagrees with Jentsch though, that Olympia, the lifelike doll, is the locus of the tale’s uncanniness. Instead, Freud claims: “The main theme of the story is […] something which gives its name to the story, and which is always re-introduced at the critical moment: it is the theme of the ‘Sand-Man’ who tears out children’s eyes” (136).

Expounding upon this argument, Freud traces the recurrence of the figure of the Sand-Man throughout the story, starting with the childhood of the story’s principal character, Nathaniel. Nathaniel’s nurse would warn the child about the Sand-Man, who would come when children refused to go to bed and pluck out their eyes. The boy comes to associate the Sand-Man with a lawyer friend of his father’s by the name of Coppelius, and, later, with Giuseppe Coppola, whose name and profession as an optician echo both Coppelius and the Sand-Man. Finally, it is the sight of Coppelius that incites Nathaniel to jump to his death. It is this phobia of losing one’s eyes that is, in Freud’s opinion, the “more striking instance of uncanniness” (137).

Freud isolates the sense of uncanniness in the “intellectual uncertainty” that is produced by the synergy between Nathaniel’s madness and the recurrent motif of the Sand-Man in the Hoffman tale. Freud then associates the childhood phobia of damage to one’s eyes with the fear of castration, or the “castration complex.” He substantiates this point by asking, “Why does Hoffmann bring the anxiety about eyes into such intimate connection with the father’s death?” (138). Freud then returns to Jentsch’s explication of the story: “dolls happen to be rather closely connected with infantile life” (141). In the story, the appearance of Olympia, the living doll, excites a feeling of uncanniness not because of an infantile fear but because of an infantile wish: a child’s wish that their toys might come alive.

Expanding his reading of Hoffman, Freud introduces the concept of the “double,” borrowed from Otto Rank, which he claims is both an infantile insurance against the destruction of the ego and the essential spiritual relation of the corporeal body and the immortal soul. Herein lies the threat of the double. Constructed as a defense against death, it returns as an echo of the original anxiety. The uncanny, then, involves regression and return. 

Next, Freud embarks on an anecdote in which he recalls walking through a town in Italy and finding himself in the red-light district. Twice, he accidentally returns to this street, which he had initially tried to avoid. This “involuntary return to the same situation” (11) induces the feeling of helplessness (as in dreams) and the uncanny, Freud claims. Were we to continually encounter the number 62, for instance, chance begins to seem more fateful. The individual is likely to “ascribe a secret meaning to this obstinate recurrence of a number” (144). Freud next cites “The Ring of Polycrates,” a story in which a guest’s every wish is immediately fulfilled by their host, inducing a sense of uncanniness. Likewise, Freud says, in the case of an obsessional neurotic, “analogous experiences” are frequently experienced.

Returning to the topic of eyes for the second time in the essay, Freud takes the example of the “evil eye,” which induces a feeling of dread, specifically of the envy of others. This, Freud says, relates to the old animistic view of the cosmos, and narcissistic overestimation processes, such as the belief in the omnipotence of thoughts. Anxiety is also inherent in the uncanny because it originates in something repressed and that recurs, Freud claims. The heimlich extends into the unheimlich because the strange contains within it something familiar that has recurred.

Next, Freud draws on Schelling’s definition of the uncanny as the appearance of something that should have remained hidden. Freud draws the example of the return of the dead as ghosts because “many people experience the feeling in the highest degree in relation to death and dead bodies” (148). Freud claims that belying this is a thinly-veiled fear of death that harkens back to the “earliest times” (149). This is because of two factors: the powerful emotions it arouses and the lack of scientific comprehension of death. Once again, Freud introduces the concept of the unconscious in relation to the uncanny: “our unconscious has as little use now as ever for the idea of its own mortality” (149). Religions have a perpetual fixation on the idea of life after death for this reason, Freud claims.

Entering the final phase of his introduction to the uncanny, Freud itemizes the factors that can “turn something fearful into an uncanny thing,” namely: animism, magic and witchcraft, the omnipotence of thoughts, death, involuntary repetition, and the castration complex (149). There is a final factor that registers as uncanny, which is a living person with “evil motives” and “special powers,” known in Roman superstition as a “Getatore.” Mephistopheles is such a figure to Gretchen in Schaeffer’s Josef Montfort. Psychoanalysis, which is “concerned with laying bare these hidden forces” (149) is therefore itself uncanny. For some, the idea of being buried alive is the “most uncanny thing of all” (150), which Freud claims is a transformation of “the phantasy of […] intra-uterine existence” (151).

Uncanny effects result from a blur between imagination and reality, or an instance in which a symbol seems to assume the full functions of what it stands for. The infantile component of this effect is present in neurotics, who over accentuate psychical reality in comparison with the physical. An anecdote about a couple’s fantasy of ghostly crocodiles is followed by notes from one of Freud’s psychoanalytical case histories, which “furnishes a beautiful confirmation of our theory of the uncanny,” according to Freud (15). Male patients who find female genitalia uncanny often dream about a familiar feeling place. The unheimlich is that which was once heimisch, or home-like, with the preface “un” signifying repression.