Finding Familiarity in the Unfamiliar: Freud’s The Uncanny

Sigmund Freud combines both aesthetics and psychoanalysis to produce his theory of the uncanny, as he provides a definition of the sensation through the German word ‘unheimlich’. The uncanny is described as something that is secretly familiar, but because it has been repressed in the past and brought forward again, it invokes the feeling of fright and unease. This uneasiness is attributed to the familiar unfamiliarity created through the process of repression and reintroduction.
Freud provides the example of ‘The Sand Man’, arguing that the main source of the uncanny in the story is not the wooden doll Olympia, but the Sand Man who tears out children’s eyes. His reasoning involves going back to a child’s apprehension of damage or loss of the eyes, which continues on to adulthood. Although the fear is justifiable, Freud reasons that the fear surrounding the eyes can still be connected to fear of castration. …show more content…
The primitive fear of death that cannot be completely eradicated, causes feelings of the uncanny due to the attempted repression of the fears and beliefs associated with death. The doppelganger or double has been referred to as an ‘uncanny harbinger of death’. of the double or doppelganger, citing is originally as insurance against the destruction of the ego. However, he states that after the ego develops past the primary stage of a child’s narcissism, the meaning of the double reverses and becomes not as a reminder of one’s own immortality, but the inevitable cessation of an individual’s conscious existence. As the ego moves past the early stages of narcissism, an agency is created that allows for self-observation. The separate observation of the ego through this agency allows for the criticism of the earlier ego, provoking the feeling of