uncanny+(Brucato)

=The Uncanny=

Definition
//Das unheimlich:// >> incredibly ( coll. ) [ quick, long ] ( Oxford-Duden 2008)
 * 1) Adjektiv
 * 2) eerie;
 * 3) ( ugs. ) ( schrecklich ) terrible ( coll. ) [ hunger, headache, etc. ] terrific ( coll. ) [ fun etc. ];
 * 4) Adverb
 * 5) eerily;
 * 6) ( ugs.: äußerst ) terribly ( coll. );

A Freudian concept referring to things (an object or situation) sensed as both familiar and alien, and the unsettling reaction to this paradox. The unsettled state (of fear) brings us back to the normal (repressed) state. The experience of the adult (civilized) who unveils the repressed experiences and mental states of the child (primitive).

It is only rarely that a psycho-analyst feels impelled to investigate the subject of aesthetics, even when aesthetics is understood to mean not merely the theory of beauty but the theory of the qualities of feeling. He works in other strata of mental life and has little to do with the subdued emotional impulses which, inhibited in their aims and dependent on a host of concurrent factors, usually furnish the material for the study of aesthetics. But it does occasionally happen that he has to interest himself in some particular province of that subject; and this province usually proves to be a rather remote one, and one which has been neglected in the specialist literature of aesthetics.

The subject of the 'uncanny' is a province of this kind. It is undoubtedly related to what is frightening — to what arouses dread and horror; equally certainly, too, the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with what excites fear in general. Yet we may expect that a special core of feeling is present which justifies the use of a special conceptual term. One is curious to know what this common core is which allows us to distinguish as 'uncanny'; certain things which lie within the field of what is frightening. (Freud 1919: 1)

This may indeed be untranslatable. "It is not difficult to see that this definition is incomplete, and we will therefore try to proceed beyond the equation 'uncanny' as 'unfamiliar'" (Freud 1919: 2). It could be considered in etymological terms, in that //unheimlich// should be the opposite of //heimlich//, meaning "familiar" or "native." The ultimate space of //nativity// is the womb, portrayed by Freud as nirvana (see Marcuse 1967), the space of safety, both from necessity and harm. Herbert Marcuse (1967) explains that experiences in civilization encourage a desire to return to the womb. This can be connected with Freud's primary concern for selecting an uncanny experience that can be traced back to an "infantile source" (1919: 9). It is in the first realization of the child of his* mortality that the fear of loss of one's eyes, of castration, and of death itself in the infant's narcissistic stage. The narcissistic stage refers to the reflection of the child -- sometimes expressed as //the soul// -- as his protection against death. When ego-development begins, self-protection becomes the duty of the ego, and sees anything external as a potential threat, even this reflection, or "double":

after having thus considered the manifest motivation of the figure of a “double,” we have to admit that none of it helps us to understand the extraordinarily strong feeling of something uncanny that pervades the conception; and our knowledge of pathological mental processes enables us to add that nothing in the content arrived at could account for that impulse towards self-protection which has caused the ego to project such a content outward as something foreign to itself. The quality of uncanniness can only come from the circumstance of the “double” being a creation dating back to a very early mental stage, long since left behind, and one, no doubt, in which it wore a more friendly aspect. The “double” has become a vision of terror, just as after the fall of their religion the gods took on daemonic shapes (Freud 1919: 10)

This uncanny object of the mind -- the reflection -- then is not something "new and unfamiliar," but "estranged only by the process of repression" (Freud 1919: 13). Freud cautions his reader to avoid reducing everything "that has undergone repression and then emerged from it," as uncanny. "Not everything that fulfills this condition—not everything that is connected with repressed desires and archaic forms of thought belonging to the past of the individual and of the race—is therefore uncanny" (Freud 1919: 15). The examples provided by Freud deal with dreams, obsessions, and fears (of being blinded or castrated, for instance) that are revealed in metaphoric imagery. Lacan's //lamella// is of this sort, where the erotic drive is confused with the objects of desire and thus becomes both familiar and external. Slavoj Zizek compares the aliens in the film //Alien// to the lamella as an indestructible and immortal embodiment of the external libido (n.d.).

The lamella is an entity of pure surface, without the density of a substance, an infinitely plastic object that can not only incessantly change its form, but can even transpose itself from one to another medium: imagine a “something” that is first heard as a shrilling sound, and then pops up as a monstrously distorted body. A lamella is indivisible, indestructible, and immortal – more precisely, undead in the sense this term has in horror fiction: not the sublime spiritual immortality, but the obscene immortality of the “living dead” which, after every annihilation, re-composes themselves and clumsily goes on. As Lacan puts it in his terms, lamella does not exist, it insists: it is unreal, an entity of pure semblance, a multiplicity of appearances which seem to envelop a central void – its status is purely fantasmatic. (Zizek n.d.)

In Freud, we see a less fantastic, but equally morbid sense of the uncanny as the "living dead," when he writes of "dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist, feet which dance by themselves"; "this kind of uncanniness springs from its association with the castration-complex" revealed in the narcissistic stage (1919: 14). But there is another class of the uncanny, for Freud.

Where the uncanny comes from infantile complexes the question of external reality is quite irrelevant; its place is taken by psychical reality. What is concerned is an actual repression of some definite material and a return of this repressed material, not a removal of the belief in its objective reality. We might say that in the one case what had been repressed was a particular ideational content and in the other the belief in its physical existence. But this last way of putting it no doubt strains the term “repression” beyond its legitimate meaning. It would be more correct to respect a perceptible psychological difference here, and to say that the animistic beliefs of civilized people have been surmounted—more or less. Our conclusion could then be stated thus: An uncanny experience occurs either when repressed infantile complexes have been revived by some impression, or when the primitive beliefs we have surmounted seem once more to be confirmed. (Freud 1919: 17)

Here we see the application of the uncanny to the study of science. It is in the imagination or experience of the unreal or impossible -- or of the previously discarded -- that doubt and uncertainty become unleashed, when the seemingly impossible inspires an unsettling of the accepted. When we are convinced that something happened that was at one time considered possible but has since been rejected -- when "we no longer believe in them" -- it challenges other beliefs: this new experience "seems to support the old, discarded believes" and we thus "get a feeling of the uncanny" (Freud 1919: 17). But this Freud recognizes as distinct from those uncanny experience that emerge from infantile phenomena, even though "these two classes of uncanny experience are not always sharply distinguishable" (Freud 1919: 18).


 * I retain Freud's masculine pronoun for obvious reasons: the fear of castration otherwise become awkward.

media type="youtube" key="7Z-HPC70ZuY" height="315" width="560"

Freud, S. (1919). "The Uncanny." Accessed at: http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/freud1.pdf Marcuse, H. (1967). //Eros & Civilization//. Vintage. Pocket Oxford-Duden German Dictionary (2008) Oxford University Press. Accessed at: //http://www.wordreference.com/deen/unheimlich// Zizek, S. (n.d.) "Troubles with the Real: Lacan as a Viewer of //Alien//"[| http://www.lacan.com/essays/?p=180]