PHILOSOPHICAL EGGS

In the last post I defined the uncanny as follows:

The uncanny is an unsettling, even terrifying, experience of the familiar suddenly becoming unfamiliar at the same time (or the unfamiliar suddenly becoming familiar at the same time).  The experience is usually associated with something dangerous, powerful, mysterious, or secret being revealed.

But how does an uncanny experience arise? Here are two interesting and quite different possibilities.

(1) The first comes from Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay “The Uncanny” (first published in Imago, Bd. V., 1919; reprinted in Sammlung, Fünfte Folge. I’ll be using a translation by Alix Strachey). Freud is well known for claiming our unconscious mind influences our actions, motives, and belief in many ways. One of the goals of his psychoanalysis was to unearth the motives and contents of the unconscious in order to give people some degree of freedom from various afflictions. This unearthing was typically undertaken with the help of dream interpretation, free association, and the analysis of parapraxes (Freudian slips), resistance to analysis, and the phenomenon of transference. But the aesthetic experience of the uncanny can also help in this effort since, according to Freud, it betrays a return of the repressed: something that we have repressed is activated by the uncanny thing and this activation is what generates the unease that what we take to be familiar is now strangely unfamiliar at the same time. In section one he begins with an impressive etymological analysis finally which leads him to this insight:

“In general we are reminded that the word heimlich is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which without being contradictory are yet very different: on the one hand, it means that which is familiar and congenial, and on the other, that which is concealed and kept out of sight….Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops towards an ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of heimlich. Let us retain this discovery, which we do not yet properly understand, alongside of Schelling’s definition of the “uncanny” [F.W.J. Schelling, German philosopher (1175-1854)]. Then if we examine individual instances of uncanniness, these indications will become comprehensible to us.”

He then moves onto various examples such as damage to one’s eyes, dolls, doppelgängers, repetitions, improbable coincidences, severed limbs, epileptic seizures, evil people, silence, darkness, the belief that thoughts and intentions can generate real effects (for example, the evil eye), and, yes, women’s genitals. After his overview and analysis of examples, he offers his groundbreaking explanation:

“This is the place now to put forward two considerations which, I think, contain the gist of this short study. In the first place, if psychoanalytic theory is correct in maintaining that every emotional affect, whatever its quality, is transformed by repression into morbid anxiety, then among such cases of anxiety there must be a class in which the anxiety can be shown to come from something repressed which recurs. This class of morbid anxiety would then be no other than what is uncanny, irrespective of whether it originally aroused dread or some other affect. In the second place, if this is indeed the secret nature of the uncanny, we can understand why the usage of speech has extended das Heimliche [the homely, familiar] into its opposite das Unheimliche [unhomely, unfamiliar]; for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old—established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression. This reference to the factor of repression enables us, furthermore, to understand Schelling’s definition of the uncanny as something which ought to have been kept concealed but which has nevertheless come to light.”

For example, when we were children, we saw things around us as alive, as animated. We spoke to toys and related to them as subjects. The books we read and the images we saw often depicted a world of talking objects and animals to which we related in a meaningful way. According to Freud, we were animists. But then we grew up and learned that our beloved toys are just objects with no life and that plants and animals are not human. We came to see the world as matter in motion and became scientific, realistic, mature, etc. But in many people these animistic tendencies don’t simply disappear: they are repressed and disappear into the unconscious. So, when a mature adult gets unsettled by a ventriloquist’s dummy like the one in the above from the movie Magic, Freud would say that what is familiar—an object that is simply wood—has suddenly become unfamiliar in light of repressed beliefs about dolls having life and being subjects. Thus the doll is perceived as both dead and alive at the same time; both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. But not familiar and unfamiliar in the same respect which would be contradictory. Rather, we (1) see the doll as alive from the perspective of our repressed, animistic tendencies in the unconscious and (2) see the doll as dead from the perspective of our conscious, scientific outlook. So Freud’s introduction of the unconscious helps us avoid contradiction and offers an explanation of how we can have such a disturbing and ambiguous feeling. The animism which returns is a return of a repressed: something once familiar has come back to haunt us.

(2) Rudolf Otto, in his 1917 book The Idea of the Holy (Oxford, 958), argues that the uncanny marks a primal experience of the sacred that is the ground for more organized and articulated religious development. For Otto, the experience of the sacred is a mix of awe and attraction: on one hand, we are terrified, on the other hand, we are enticed to get closer.  Otto argues that humans have always been having experiences whereby certain everyday phenomena suddenly give rise to both awe and attraction. How does this occur?  Rather than seek a purely naturalistic interpretation like Freud, Otto thinks powers of the soul are at work: there is spiritual energy that is excited and this energy is experienced as terrifying and fascinating.  It is what he calls “numinous energy”. Demons, ghosts, and other uncanny things are typically the objectification of this energy: they are the products of our limited imagination trying to give form to this unpredictable energy. Freud would say such products of our imagination are false but held onto in the unconsciousness.  But Otto argues that such beliefs, while they may not always be accurate, do emerge because of real spiritual powers like our soul and its relation to God. Our experience of the uncanny in the presence of such representations of the numinous can be terrifying precisely because such things were our limited reactions to the numinous. Consider these passages:

“At least there is none of us who has any living capacity for emotion but must have known at some time or at some place what it is to feel really uncanny, to have a feeling of ‘eerie-ness.’ And more exact psychological analysis will notice the following points in such a state of mind. First, there is the point of which we have already spoken, its separate and underivable, irreducible, qualitative character. Second, there is the very curious circumstance that the external features occasioning this state of mind are often quite slight, indeed so scanty that hardly any account can be given of them, so disproportionate are they to the strength of the emotional impression itself. Indeed force and violence of the emotion so far exceeds any impressiveness contributed by the circumstances of time and place that one can often scarcely speak of an ‘impression’ at all, but at most of an encounter, serving as cue or occasion for the felt experience. This experience of eerie shuddering and awe breaks out rather from depths of the soul which the circumstantial, external impression cannot sound, and the force with which it breaks out is so disproportionate to the mere external stimulation that the eruption may be termed, if not entirely, at least very nearly, spontaneous. And with this we are brought to the third point which psychological analysis of the uncanny experience brings to view: meanings are aroused and awakened in it of a unique and special content, though altogether obscure, latent, and germinal, which are the real ground for the emotion of awe. For, if such meanings are not there at the start in some form or other, the mental and emotional disturbance could never take place. In the fourth place, the mental state we are discussing may, on the one hand, remain pure feeling, pursue its course and pass away without its obscure thought-content being rendered explicit. If in this implicit form it is summed up in a phrase, this will be merely some such exclamation as: ‘How uncanny!’ or ‘How eerie this place is!’ On the other hand, the implicit meaning may be rendered explicit. It is already a beginning of this explicative process though still in merely negative terms when a man says: It is not quite right here; It is uncanny. The English ‘This place is haunted’ shows a transition to a positive form of expression. Here we have the obscure basis of meaning and idea rising into greater clarity and beginning to make itself explicit as the notion, however vague and fleeting, of a transcendent Something, a real operative entity of a numinous kind, which later, as the development proceeds, assumes concrete form as a ‘numen loci’, a daemon, an ‘El,’ a Baal, or the like.” (125-126)

So it seems like Freud is an enlightenment thinker who is using reason to delve into the unconsciousness and explain its mysterious powers as a natural function of our mind (e.g., mechanisms of repression). But Otto is arguing for irrational and supernatural powers beyond our mind, indeed beyond nature. Both these approaches are long-standing features of the gothic aspects of romanticism and offer us two general ways to think about horror. For many, horror, in art and life, presents situations where supernatural forces collide, where good and evil take stands, and where the destiny of people’s souls is decided. Such situations remain live possibilities for all of us and we should take them seriously to some extent, open our minds to them, and learn from them what we can for our own spiritual development. In many cases this approach will lean heavily on feelings, emotions, and the lived experience. But for others, horror can be explained without recourse to supernatural powers and the grand narratives of good and evil. Rather, we need a better naturalistic understanding of the human mind and social institutions to dispel our fears (often childish ones), assuage them, medicate them, learn from them, and try to overcome them.

Go here for part three which connects the uncanny to surrealism.