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, a naturalistic one from Sigmund Freud and a supernaturalistic one from Rudolph Otto, that have been very influential and give us a lot to think about.

Sigmund Freud’s Account

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.

Magic, 1978

Freud goes on to apply the same strategy to his other examples and unearths a unique form of repression for each whether an infantile complex or a primitive belief. For example, mechanical repetitions are related to a repressed death instinct with its compulsion to repeat; doppelgangers and ghosts are related to a repressed childhood denial of death which doubled the self (as well as repressed demands of the superego that form later in life and unfulfilled wishes of the ego); severed body parts and damage to our eyes are related to a repressed fear of castration; possession-like events such as epilepsy are related to a repressed belief that we are, despite our sense of freedom, determined by physical law; evil eyes and effects that correlate with our wishes are related to a repressed belief in the omnipotence of thought based on childhood narcissism; and premature burials and women’s genitals are related to a repressed death instinct which pulls us back into the womb or an “intra-uterine existence.” This wide scope of examples suggests how therapeutic and liberating an understanding of the uncanny might be.  

Take note that this analysis can be expanded in the direction of social justice if we focus on a return of the oppressed. Here I think of John Carpenter’s classic film The Fog (1980) which confronts us with an uncanny fog (it moves againstthe wind and has a purpose) that is the vehicle for ghosts who have returned to redress a grave injustice, one that was the means to establishing a flourishing and self-righteous community. The injustice is based on a true event in the early 1800s in which indigenous people were massacred in the vicinity of Goleta, California. A non-fictional exploration of this return of the oppressed with reference to indigenous people is found in The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects by Rene L. Bergland. So both fictional and non-fictional narratives can expand past the psychological dimension and do something Freud was very much concerned with: cultural critique.

Rudolf Otto’s Account

In his 1917 book The Idea of the Holy (Oxford, 1958) the German theologian and philosopher Rudolf Otto argues that the uncanny marks a primal experience of the sacred that is the ground for more articulated religious development towards monotheism. Otto argues that humans have always been having encounters with the holy which are fascinating (fascinans), mysterious (mysterium) and something else which Otto thinks hadn’t been adequately explored or even explored at all in the past: terrifying (tremendum). We are terrified by the presence of something ineffable or “wholly other” and, despite the “creeping flesh” this presence can induce, we are enticed to unravel it. Otto names the experience and feeling of the holy “the numinous” which is an unique category of experience not reducible to reason or empirical sensation. Demons, ghosts, and other uncanny things are products of our limited imagination unsuccessfully trying to give finite form to the infinite transcendence of the holy. As he writes:

“‘Religious dread’ (or ‘awe’) would perhaps be a better designation. Its antecedent stage is ‘daemonic dread’ (cf. the horror of Pan) with its queer perversion, a sort of abortive off-shoot, the ‘dread of ghosts’ It first begins to stir in the feeling of ‘something uncanny’, ‘eerie’, or ‘weird’. It is this feeling which, emerging in the mind of primeval man, forms the starting-point for the entire religious development in history. ‘Daemons’ and ‘gods’ alike spring from this root, and all the products of ‘mythological apperception’ or ‘fantasy’ are nothing but different modes in which it has been objectified. And all ostensible explanations of the origin of religion in terms of animism or magic or folk psychology are doomed from the outset to wander astray and miss the real goal of their inquiry, unless they recognize this fact of our nature—primary, unique, underivable from anything else—to be the basic factor and the basic impulse underlying the entire process of religious evolution.” (14-15).

Freud would say such products of our imagination are false but held in the unconscious, usually in the form of repressed animism. But Otto, as we just saw, argues that such beliefs, while they may not always be accurate, do emerge because of real spiritual powers rather than animism or folk psychology. 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 terror of the numinous. And we wouldn’t have such uncanny terror in the first place unless we had a soul with a propensity for experiencing the uncanny or the holy in a primitive form. Consider these four points interrelated points he makes which defend this claim:

“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 the uncanny for Otto is not a return of the repressed but a feeling that marks an encounter with the holy which activates various innate capacities of the soul. These capacities, in being stimulated, are necessarily prone to generate misinterpretations of the numinous that are literally false. But with further elucidation they can be directed towards our ultimate object of concern which would be God as the mysterious ground of our being to whom we are related in an intimate way. Being so directed we can hope to overcome the superstitions of the uncanny, embrace true monotheism, and be liberated from a completely physical existence devoid of spirituality and God.

Natural or Supernatural Uncanniness?

The experience of the uncanny is one that undermines the stable dualities, identities, objects, relationships, and expectations that make our world a place we can call home. This, of course, can be problematic to say the least. But such liquidations of our bearings can open up new possibilities which can help us grow. 

As we’ve seen, Freud believed the uncanny could help us unearth forms of repression, reclaim more of the realm of the id for the ego and, in doing so, learn more about ourselves, expand our narratives of identity, and be free to live more balanced and fulfilling lives. His impressive list of uncanny things and their corresponding forms of repression promises to empower us to, on the one hand, see the uncanny as a potentially positive thing and, on the other hand, use it to dispel many unconscious forces that continue to afflict us. And his approach is firmly naturalistic in that it thinks we can explain uncanny phenomena without recourse to anything supernatural. 

We’ve also seen how Otto’s account attempts to liberate ourselves from uncanny terrors by helping us see how they can be reinterpreted as primitive signs of the holy. And these signs can move us in the direction of fulfilling spiritual development. Rather than just unearthing repressed contents from the depths of the unconsciousness in order to cope more with physical reality, we can hope to ascend to, and commune with, supernatural powers that promise to transfigure the self in ways unavailable to psychoanalysis or any other naturalistic approach. 

Both these accounts are certainly fascinating. But are they true? Well, if we are looking for scientific verification then both views may run into obstacles. Otto’s view relies a great deal on innate capacities (reason and imagination for example) which, rather than being derived from empirical analysis, are the grounds for such analysis. And his justification for both the soul’s capacities and their affinity to God is ultimately in terms of feelings.

When we turn to Freud, we see that his talking cure, situated as it is between the analyst and the patient in private, may by its very nature be incapable of meeting the scientific demands of falsifiability, repeatable experiments, control groups, large samples, random samples, clear identification of both cause and effect, and so on. It seems clear that Freud did think in terms of a kind of verification: if a patient is freed from some affliction then the analysis most likely hit upon the truth since a misinterpretation, while it might assuage someone for a time, would never remove the root cause of the problem (this has been named the “tally argument” for psychoanalytic success by philosopher Adolph Grunbaum: does the analyst’s suggestions tally with the facts and lead to a resolution of conflict?). And Freud did, I think, have a unique neurological theory of the mind that didn’t exclude scientific verification and would have, if he were alive today, allowed him to make psychoanalysis more scientific. That said, he, like Otto, certainly emphasizes how we feel and this may prove problematic to some.

Of course, we must remember that the uncanny is an aesthetic experience, one that is primarily about feelings despite all the foregoing conceptualization, and so demands to make aesthetics into a science may be unfounded despite being important in other contexts. If one allows aesthetics to offer evidence on its own terms then the theories under consideration become less problematic. The remaining question will be how to best interpret these feelings. Freud and Otto give us two broad approaches: natural or supernatural. 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.

But perhaps a more uncanny solution would undermine the clear boundary between the natural and supernatural and open up the possibility that it might be a strange mixture of both.

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

Go here for my other posts on Freud.

Go here for my overview of the Kantian sublime.

Go here for my overview of Kant’s account of beauty.

Go here for my other posts on aesthetics.