The “Uncanny”¹

Ⅰ

It is only rarely that a psy­cho­an­a­lyst 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 planes of mental life and has little to do with those sub­dued emo­tional activ­i­ties which, inhib­ited in their aims and depen­dent upon a mul­ti­tude 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 then it usu­ally proves to be a rather remote region of it and one that has been neglected in stan­dard works.

The sub­ject of the “uncanny” is a prov­ince of this kind. It undoubt­edly belongs to all that is ter­ri­ble—to all that arouses dread and creep­ing horror; it is equally cer­tain, too, that the word is not always used in a clearly defin­able sense, so that it tends to coin­cide with what­ever excites dread. Yet we may expect that it implies some intrin­sic qual­ity which jus­ti­fies the use of a spe­cial name. One is curi­ous to know what this pecu­liar qual­ity is which allows us to dis­tin­guish as “uncanny” cer­tain things within the bound­aries of what is “fear­ful.”

As good as noth­ing is to be found upon this sub­ject in elab­o­rate trea­tises on aes­thet­ics, which in gen­eral prefer to con­cern them­selves with what is beau­ti­ful, attrac­tive and sub­lime, that is with feel­ings of a pos­i­tive nature, with the cir­cum­stances and the objects that call them forth, rather than with the oppo­site feel­ings of unpleas­ant­ness and repul­sion. I know of only one attempt in medico-psy­cho­log­i­cal lit­er­a­ture, a fer­tile but not exhaus­tive paper by E. Jentsch.² But I must con­fess that I have not made a very thor­ough exam­i­na­tion of the bib­li­og­ra­phy, espe­cially the for­eign lit­er­a­ture, relat­ing to this present modest con­tri­bu­tion of mine, for rea­sons which must be obvi­ous at this time;³ so that my paper is pre­sented to the reader with­out any claim of pri­or­ity.

In his study of the “uncanny,” Jentsch quite rightly lays stress on the obsta­cle pre­sented by the fact that people vary so very greatly in their sen­si­tiv­ity to this qual­ity of feel­ing. The writer of the present con­tri­bu­tion, indeed, must him­self plead guilty to a spe­cial obtuse­ness in the matter, where extreme del­i­cacy of per­cep­tion would be more in place. It is long since he has expe­ri­enced or heard of any­thing which has given him an uncanny impres­sion, and he will be obliged to trans­late him­self into that state of feel­ing, and to awaken in him­self the pos­si­bil­ity of it before he begins. Still, dif­fi­cul­ties of this kind make them­selves felt pow­er­fully in many other branches of aes­thet­ics; we need not on this account despair of find­ing instances in which the qual­ity in ques­tion will be rec­og­nized with­out hes­i­ta­tion by most people.

Two cour­ses are open to us at the start. Either we can find out what mean­ing has come to be attached to the word “uncanny” in the course of its his­tory; or we can col­lect all those prop­er­ties of per­sons, things, sen­sa­tions, expe­ri­ences and sit­u­a­tions which arouse in us the feel­ing of uncan­ni­ness, and then infer the unknown nature of the uncanny from what they all have in common. I will say at once that both cour­ses lead to the same result: the “uncanny” is that class of the ter­ri­fy­ing which leads back to some­thing long known to us, once very famil­iar. How this is pos­si­ble, in what cir­cum­stances the famil­iar can become uncanny and fright­en­ing, I shall show in what fol­lows. Let me also add that my inves­ti­ga­tion was actu­ally begun by col­lect­ing a number of indi­vid­ual cases, and only later received con­fir­ma­tion after I had exam­ined what lan­guage could tell us. In this dis­cus­sion, how­ever, I shall follow the oppo­site course.

The German word unheim­lich⁴ is obvi­ously the oppo­site of heim­lich, heimisch, mean­ing “famil­iar,” “native,” “belong­ing to the home”; and we are tempted to con­clude that what is “uncanny” is fright­en­ing pre­cisely because it is not known and famil­iar. Nat­u­rally not every­thing which is new and unfa­mil­iar is fright­en­ing, how­ever; the rela­tion cannot be inverted. We can only say that what is novel can easily become fright­en­ing and uncanny; some new things are fright­en­ing but not by any means all. Some­thing has to be added to what is novel and unfa­mil­iar to make it uncanny.

On the whole, Jentsch did not get beyond this rela­tion of the uncanny to the novel and unfa­mil­iar. He ascribes the essen­tial factor in the pro­duc­tion of the feel­ing of uncan­ni­ness to intel­lec­tual uncer­tainty; so that the uncanny would always be that in which one does not know where one is, as it were. The better ori­en­tated in his envi­ron­ment a person is, the less read­ily will he get the impres­sion of some­thing uncanny in regard to the objects and events in it.

It is not dif­fi­cult to see that this def­i­ni­tion is incom­plete, and we will there­fore try to pro­ceed beyond the equa­tion of unheim­lich with unfa­mil­iar. We will first turn to other lan­guages. But for­eign dic­tio­nar­ies tell us noth­ing new, per­haps only because we speak a dif­fer­ent lan­guage. Indeed, we get the impres­sion that many lan­guages are with­out a word for this par­tic­u­lar vari­ety of what is fear­ful.

I wish to express my indebt­ed­ness to Dr. Th. Reik for the fol­low­ing excerpts:

LATIN: (K. E. Gorges, Deutschlateinis­ches Wörter­buch, 1898). Ein unheim­licher Ort [an uncanny place]—locus sus­pec­tus; in unheim­licher Nachtzeit [in the dismal night hours]—intem­pesta nocte.

GREEK: (Rost’s and Schenki’s Lexikons). Xenos strange, for­eign.

ENG­LISH: (from dic­tio­nar­ies by Lucas, Bellow, Flügel, Muret-Sanders). Uncom­fort­able, uneasy, gloomy, dismal, uncanny, ghastly; (of a house) haunted; (of a man) a repul­sive fellow.

FRENCH: (Sachs-Vil­latte). Inquié­tant, sin­istre, lugubre, mal à son aise.

SPAN­ISH: (Toll­hausen, 1889). Sospe­choso, de mal aguëro, lugubre, sinie­stro.

The Ital­ian and the Por­tuguese seem to con­tent them­selves with words which we should describe as cir­cum­lo­cu­tions. In Arabic and Hebrew “uncanny” means the same as “dae­monic,” “grue­some.”

Let us there­fore return to the German lan­guage. In Daniel Sanders’ Wörter­buch der deutschen Sprache (1860), the fol­low­ing remarksⁱ [abstracted in trans­la­tion] are found upon the word heim­lich; I have laid stress on cer­tain pas­sages by ital­i­ciz­ing them.

Heim­lich, adj.: Ⅰ. Also heimelich, heinielig, belong­ing to the house, not strange, famil­iar, tame, inti­mate, com­fort­able, homely, etc.

(a) (Obso­lete) belong­ing to the house or the family, or regarded as so belong­ing (cf. Latin famil­iaris): Die Heim­lichen, the mem­bers of the house­hold; Der heim­liche Rat [him to whom secrets are revealed] Gen. ⅩⅬⅠ. 45; 2 Sam. ⅩⅩⅢ. 23; now more usu­ally Geheimer Rat [Privy Coun­cil­lor], cf. Heim­licher.

(b) Of ani­mals: tame, com­pan­ion­able to man. As opposed to wild, e.g. “Wild ani­mals… that are trained to be heim­lich and accus­tomed to men.” “If these young crea­tures are brought up from early days among men they become quite heim­lich, friendly,” etc.

(c) Friendly, inti­mate, home­like; the enjoy­ment of quiet con­tent, etc., arous­ing a sense of peace­ful plea­sure and secu­rity as in one within the four walls of his house. “Is it still heim­lich to you in your coun­try where strangers are felling your woods?” “She did not feel all too heim­lich with him.” “To destroy the Heim­lichkeit of the home.” “I could not read­ily find another spot so inti­mate and heim­lich as this.” “In quiet Hein­zlichkeit, sur­rounded by close walls.” “A care­ful house­wife, who knows how to make a pleas­ing Heim­lichkeit (Häus­lichkeit)⁵ out of the small­est means.” “The protes­tant rulers do not feel… heim­lich among their catholic sub­jects.” “When it grows heim­lich and still, and the evening quiet alone watches over your cell.” “Quiet, lovely and heim­lich, no place more fitted for her rest.” “The in and out flow­ing waves of the cur­rents dreamy and heim­lich as a cradle-song.” Cf. in espe­cial Unheim­lich. Among Swabian and Swiss authors in espe­cial, often as tri­syl­la­ble: “How heimelich it seemed again of an evening, back at home.” “The warm room and the heimelig after­noon.” “Little by little they grew at ease and heimelig among them­selves.” “That which comes from afar… assuredly does not live quite heimelig (heimatlich [at home], fre­und­nach­bar­lich [in a neigh­borly way]) among the people.” “The sen­tinel’s horn sounds so heimelig from the tower, and his voice invites so hos­pitably.” This form of the word ought to become gen­eral in order to pro­tect the word from becom­ing obso­lete in its good sense through an easy con­fu­sion with Ⅱ. [see below]. ‘“The Zecks [a family name] are all “heim­lich.”’ ‘“Heim­lich”? What do you under­stand by “heim­lich”?’ ‘Well,… they are like a buried spring or a dried-up pond. One cannot walk over it with­out always having the feel­ing that water might come up there again.’ ‘Oh, we call it “unheim­lich”; you call it “heim­lich.” Well, what makes you think that there is some­thing secret and untrust­wor­thy about this family?”’ Gutzkow.

Ⅱ. Con­cealed, kept from sight, so that others do not get to know about it, with­held from others, cf. Geheim [secret]; so also Heim­lichkeit for Geheim­nis [secret]. To do some­thing heim­lich, i.e. behind some­one’s back; to steal away heim­lich; heim­lich meet­ings and appoint­ments; to look on with heim­lich plea­sure at some­one’s dis­com­fi­ture; to sigh or weep heim­lich; to behave heim­lich, as though there was some­thing to con­ceal; heim­lich love, love-affair, sin; heim­lich places (which good man­ners oblige us to con­ceal). 1 Sam, Ⅴ. 6; “The heim­lich cham­ber” [privy]. 2 Kings Ⅹ. 27 etc.; “To throw into pits or Heim­lichkeit.” Led the steeds heim­lich before Laome­don.” “As secre­tive, heim­lich, deceit­ful and mali­cious towards cruel mas­ters… as frank, open, sym­pa­thetic and help­ful towards a friend in mis­for­tune.” “The heim­lich art” (magic). “Where public ven­ti­la­tion has to stop, there heim­lich machi­na­tions begin.” “Free­dom is the whis­pered watch­word of heim­lich con­spir­a­tors and the loud battle-cry of pro­fessed rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies.” “A holy, heim­lich effect.” “I have roots that are most heim­lich, I am grown in the deep earth.” “My heim­lich pranks.” (Cf. Heimtücke [mis­chief]). To dis­cover, dis­close, betray some­one’s Heim­lichkeiten; “to con­coct Heim­lichkeiten behind my back.” Cf. Geheim­nis.

Com­pounds and espe­cially also the oppo­site follow mean­ing Ⅰ. (above): Unheim­lich, uneasy, eerie, blood­cur­dling; “Seem­ing almost unheim­lich and ‘ghostly’ to him.” “I had already long since felt an unheim­lich, even grue­some feel­ing.” “Feels an unheim­lich horror.” “Unheim­lich and motion­less like a stone-image.” “The unheim­lich mist called hill-fog.” “These pale youths are unheim­lich and are brew­ing heaven knows what mis­chief.” “‘Unheim­lich’ is the name for every­thing that ought to have remained… hidden and secret and has become vis­i­ble,” Schelling. “To veil the divine, to sur­round it with a cer­tain Unheim­lichkeit.”—Unheim­lich is not often used as oppo­site to mean­ing Ⅱ. (above).

What inter­ests us most in this long extract is to find that among its dif­fer­ent shades of mean­ing the word heim­lich exhibits one which is iden­ti­cal with its oppo­site, unheim­lich. What is heim­lich thus comes to be unheim­lich. (Cf. the quo­ta­tion from Gutzkow: “We call it unheim­lich; you call it heim­lich.”) 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. The word unheim­lich is only used cus­tom­ar­ily, we are told, as the con­trary of the first sig­ni­fi­ca­tion, and not of the second. Sanders tells us noth­ing con­cern­ing a pos­si­ble genetic con­nec­tion between these two sorts of mean­ings. On the other hand, we notice that Schelling says some­thing which throws quite a new light on the con­cept of the “uncanny,” one which we had cer­tainly not awaited. Accord­ing to him every­thing is uncanny that ought to have remained hidden and secret, and yet comes to light.

Some of the doubts that have thus arisen are removed if we con­sult Grimm’s dic­tio­nary.^Ⅱ

We read:

Heim­lich; adj. and adv. ver­nac­u­lus, occul­tus; MHG. heimelîch, heim­lîch.

P. 874. In a slightly dif­fer­ent sense: “I feel heim­lich, well, free from fear.”…

(b) Heim­lich, also in the sense of a place free from ghostly influ­ences… famil­iar, friendly, inti­mate.

4. From the idea of “home­like,” “belong­ing to the house,” the fur­ther idea is devel­oped of some­thing with­drawn from the eyes of others, some­thing con­cealed, secret, and this idea is expanded in many ways…

P. 876. “On the left bank of the lake there lies a meadow heim­lich in the wood.” Schiller, Tell… Poetic licence, rarely so used in modern speech… In con­junc­tion with a verb express­ing the act of con­ceal­ing: “In the secret of his taber­na­cle he shall hide me (heim­lich).” Ps. ⅩⅩⅦ. 5… Heim­lich places in the human body, pudenda… “the men that died not were smit­ten” (on their heim­lich parts). 1 Samuel Ⅴ. 12.

(c) Offi­cials who give impor­tant advice which has to be kept secret in mat­ters of state are called heim­lich coun­cil­lors; the adjec­tive, accord­ing to modern usage, having been replaced by geheim [secret]… ‘Pharaoh called Joseph’s name “him to whom secrets are revealed”’ (heim­lich coun­cil­lor). Gen. ⅩⅬⅠ. 45.

P. 878. 6. Heim­lich, as used of knowl­edge, mystic, alle­gor­i­cal: a heim­lich mean­ing, mys­ti­cus, div­i­nus, occul­tus, fig­u­ra­tus.

P. 878. Heim­lich in a dif­fer­ent sense, as with­drawn from knowl­edge, uncon­scious:… Heim­lich also has the mean­ing of that which is obscure, inac­ces­si­ble to knowl­edge… “Do you not see? They do not trust me; they fear the heim­lich face of the Duke of Fried­land.” Wal­len­steins Lager, Act. 2.

9. The notion of some­thing hidden and dan­ger­ous, which is expressed in the last para­graph, is still fur­ther devel­oped, so that “heim­lich” comes to have the mean­ing usu­ally ascribed to “unheim­lich.” Thus: “At times I feel like a man who walks in the night and believes in ghosts; every corner is heim­lich and full of ter­rors for him.” Klinger.

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.” Then if we exam­ine indi­vid­ual instances of uncan­ni­ness, these indi­ca­tions will become com­pre­hen­si­ble to us.

Ⅱ

In pro­ceed­ing to review those things, per­sons, impres­sions, events and sit­u­a­tions which are able to arouse in us a feel­ing of the uncanny in a very forcible and def­i­nite form, the first require­ment is obvi­ously to select a suit­able exam­ple to start upon. Jentsch has taken as a very good instance “doubts whether an appar­ently ani­mate being is really alive; or con­versely, whether a life­less object might not be in fact ani­mate”; and he refers in this con­nec­tion to the impres­sion made by wax-work fig­ures, arti­fi­cial dolls and automa­tons. He adds to this class the uncanny effect of epilep­tic seizures and the man­i­fes­ta­tions of insan­ity, because these excite in the spec­ta­tor the feel­ing that auto­matic, mechan­i­cal pro­cesses are at work, con­cealed beneath the ordi­nary appear­ance of ani­ma­tion. With­out entirely accept­ing the author’s view, we will take it as a start­ing-point for our inves­ti­ga­tion because it leads us on to con­sider a writer who has suc­ceeded better than anyone else in pro­duc­ing uncanny effects.

Jentsch says: “In telling a story, one of the most suc­cess­ful devices for easily cre­at­ing uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncer­tainty whether a par­tic­u­lar figure in the story is a human being or an autom­a­ton; and to do it in such a way that his atten­tion is not directly focused upon his uncer­tainty, so that he may not be urged to go into the matter and clear it up imme­di­ately, since that, as we have said, would quickly dis­si­pate the pecu­liar emo­tional effect of the thing. Hoff­mann has repeat­edly employed this psy­cho­log­i­cal arti­fice with suc­cess in his fan­tas­tic nar­ra­tives.”

This obser­va­tion, undoubt­edly a cor­rect one, refers pri­mar­ily to the story of “The Sand-Man” in Hoff­mann’s Nacht­stücken,⁶ which con­tains the orig­i­nal of Olympia, the doll in the first act of Offen­bach’s opera, Tales of Hoff­mann. But I cannot think—and I hope that most read­ers of the story will agree with me—that the theme of the doll, Olympia, who is to all appear­ances a living being, is by any means the only ele­ment to be held respon­si­ble for the quite unpar­al­leled atmos­phere of uncan­ni­ness which the story evokes; or, indeed, that it is the most impor­tant among them. Nor is this effect of the story height­ened by the fact that the author him­self treats the episode of Olympia with a faint touch of satire and uses it to make fun of the young man’s ide­al­iza­tion of his mis­tress. The main theme of the story is, on the con­trary, some­thing dif­fer­ent, 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.

This fan­tas­tic tale begins with the child­hood-rec­ol­lec­tions of the stu­dent Nathaniel: in spite of his present hap­pi­ness, he cannot banish the mem­o­ries asso­ci­ated with the mys­te­ri­ous and ter­ri­fy­ing death of the father he loved. On cer­tain evenings his mother used to send the chil­dren to bed early, warn­ing them that “the Sand-Man was coming”; and sure enough Nathaniel would not fail to hear the heavy tread of a vis­i­tor with whom his father would then be occu­pied that evening. When ques­tioned about the Sand-Man, his mother, it is true, denied that such a person existed except as a form of speech; but his nurse could give him more def­i­nite infor­ma­tion: “He is a wicked man who comes when chil­dren won’t go to bed, and throws hand­fuls of sand in their eyes so that they jump out of their heads all bleed­ing. Then he puts the eyes in a sack and car­ries them off to the moon to feed his chil­dren. They sit up there in their nest, and their beaks are hooked like owls’ beaks, and they use them to peck up naughty boys’ and girls’ eyes with.”

Although little Nathaniel was sen­si­ble and old enough not to believe in such grue­some attributes to the figure of the Sand-Man, yet the dread of him became fixed in his breast. He deter­mined to find out what the Sand-Man looked like; and one evening, when the Sand-Man was again expected, he hid him­self in his father’s study. He rec­og­nized the vis­i­tor as the lawyer Cop­pelius, a repul­sive person of whom the chil­dren were fright­ened when he occa­sion­ally came to a meal; and he now iden­ti­fied this Cop­pelius with the dreaded Sand-Man. Con­cern­ing the rest of the scene, Hoff­mann already leaves us in doubt whether we are wit­ness­ing the first delir­ium of the panic-stricken boy, or a suc­ces­sion of events which are to be regarded in the story as being real. His father and the guest begin to busy them­selves at a hearth with glow­ing flames. The little eaves­drop­per hears Cop­pelius call out, “Here with your eyes!” and betrays him­self by scream­ing aloud; Cop­pelius seizes him and is about to drop grains of red-hot coal out of the fire into his eyes, so as to cast them out on the hearth. His father begs him off and saves his eyes. After this the boy falls into a deep swoon; and a long ill­ness fol­lowed upon his expe­ri­ence. Those who lean towards a ratio­nal­is­tic inter­pre­ta­tion of the Sand-Man will not fail to rec­og­nize in the child’s phan­tasy the con­tin­ued influ­ence of his nurse’s story. The grains of sand that are to be thrown into the child’s eyes turn into red-hot grains of coal out of the flames; and in both cases they are meant to make his eyes jump out. In the course of another visit of the Sand-Man’s, a year later, his father was killed in his study by an explo­sion. The lawyer Cop­pelius van­ished from the place with­out leav­ing a trace behind.

Nathaniel, now a stu­dent, believes that he has rec­og­nized this child­hood’s phan­tom of horror in an itin­er­ant opti­cian, an Ital­ian called Giuseppe Cop­pola. This man had offered him barom­e­ters for sale in his uni­ver­sity town and when Nathaniel refused had added: “Eh, not barom­e­ters, not barom­e­ters—also got fine eyes, beau­ti­ful eyes.” The stu­dent’s terror was allayed on find­ing that the prof­fered eyes were only harm­less spec­ta­cles, and he bought a pocket tele­scope from Cop­pola. With its aid he looks across into Pro­fes­sor Spalan­zani’s house oppo­site and there spies Spalan­zani’s beau­ti­ful, but strangely silent and motion­less daugh­ter, Olympia. He soon falls in love with her so vio­lently that he quite for­gets his clever and sen­si­ble betrothed on her account. But Olympia was an autom­a­ton whose works Spalan­zani had made, and whose eyes Cop­pola, the Sand-Man, had put in. The stu­dent sur­prises the two men quar­relling over their hand­i­work. The opti­cian car­ries off the wooden eye­less doll; and the mechani­cian, Spalan­zani, takes up Olympia’s bleed­ing eye-balls from the ground and throws them at Nathaniel’s breast, saying that Cop­pola had stolen them from him (Nathaniel). Nathaniel suc­cumbs to a fresh attack of mad­ness, and in his delir­ium his rec­ol­lec­tion of his father’s death is min­gled with this new expe­ri­ence. He cries, “Faster—faster— faster—rings of fire—rings of fire! Whirl about, rings of fire—round and round! Wooden doll, ho! lovely wooden doll, whirl about——,” then falls upon the pro­fes­sor, Olympia’s so-called father, and tries to stran­gle him.

Ral­ly­ing from a long and seri­ous ill­ness, Nathaniel seemed at last to have recov­ered. He was going to marry his betrothed with whom he was rec­on­ciled. One day he was walk­ing through the town and mar­ket­place, where the high tower of the Town-Hall threw its huge shadow. On the girl’s sug­ges­tion they mounted the tower, leav­ing her brother, who was walk­ing with them, down below. Up there, Clara’s atten­tion is drawn to a curi­ous object coming along the street. Nathaniel looks at this thing through Cop­pola’s spy­glass, which he finds in his pocket, and falls into a new fit of mad­ness. Shout­ing out, “Whirl about, my wooden doll!” he tries to fling the girl into the depths below. Her brother, brought to her side by her cries, res­cues her and has­tens down to safety with her. Up above, the raving man rushes round, shriek­ing “Rings of fire, whirl about!”—words whose origin we know. Among the people who begin to gather below there comes for­ward the figure of the lawyer Cop­pelius, sud­denly returned. We may sup­pose it was his approach, seen through the tele­scope, that threw Nathaniel into his mad­ness. People want to go up and over­power the madman, but Cop­pelius⁷ laughs and says, “Wait a bit; he’ll come down of him­self.” Nathaniel sud­denly stands still, catches sight of Cop­pelius, and with a wild shriek “Yes! ‘Fine eyes-beau­ti­ful eyes,’” flings him­self down over the para­pet. No sooner does he lie on the paving-stones with a shat­tered skull than the Sand-Man van­ishes in the throng.

This short sum­mary leaves, I think, no doubt that the feel­ing of some­thing uncanny is directly attached to the figure of the Sand-Man, that is, to the idea of being robbed of one’s eyes; and that Jentsch’s point of an intel­lec­tual uncer­tainty has noth­ing to do with this effect. Uncer­tainty whether an object is living or inan­i­mate, which we must admit in regard to the doll Olympia, is quite irrel­e­vant in con­nec­tion with this other, more strik­ing instance of uncan­ni­ness. It is true that the writer cre­ates a kind of uncer­tainty in us in the begin­ning by not let­ting us know, no doubt pur­posely, whether he is taking us into the real world or into a purely fan­tas­tic one of his own cre­ation. He has admit­ted the right to do either; and if he chooses to stage his action in a world peo­pled with spir­its, demons and ghosts, as Shake­speare does in Hamlet, in Mac­beth and, in a dif­fer­ent sense, in The Tem­pest and A Mid­sum­mer-Night’s Dream, we must bow to his deci­sion and treat his set­ting as though it were real for as long as we put our­selves into his hands. But this uncer­tainty dis­ap­pears in the course of Hoff­mann’s story, and we per­ceive that he means to make us, too, look through the fell Cop­pola’s glasses—per­haps, indeed, that he him­self once gazed through such an instru­ment. For the con­clu­sion of the story makes it quite clear that Cop­pola the opti­cian really is the lawyer Cop­pelius and thus also the Sand-Man.

There is no ques­tion, there­fore, of any “intel­lec­tual uncer­tainty”; we know now that we are not sup­posed to be look­ing on at the prod­ucts of a madman’s imag­i­na­tion behind which we, with the supe­ri­or­ity of ratio­nal minds, are able to detect the sober truth; and yet this knowl­edge does not lessen the impres­sion of uncan­ni­ness in the least degree. The theory of “intel­lec­tual uncer­tainty” is thus inca­pable of explain­ing that impres­sion.

We know from psy­cho­an­a­lytic expe­ri­ence, how­ever, that this fear of dam­ag­ing or losing one’s eyes is a ter­ri­ble fear of child­hood. Many adults still retain their appre­hen­sive­ness in this respect, and no bodily injury is so much dreaded by them as an injury to the eye. We are accus­tomed to say, too, that we will trea­sure a thing as the apple of our eye. A study of dreams, phan­tasies and myths has taught us that a morbid anx­i­ety con­nected with the eyes and with going blind is often enough a sub­sti­tute for the dread of cas­tra­tion. In blind­ing him­self, Oedi­pus, that myth­i­cal law-breaker, was simply car­ry­ing out a mit­i­gated form of the pun­ish­ment of cas­tra­tion—the only pun­ish­ment that accord­ing to the lex tal­io­nis was fitted for him. We may try to reject the deriva­tion of fears about the eye from the fear of cas­tra­tion on ratio­nal­is­tic grounds, and say that it is very nat­u­ral that so pre­cious an organ as the eye should be guarded by a pro­por­tion­ate dread; indeed, we might go fur­ther and say that the fear of cas­tra­tion itself con­tains no other sig­nif­i­cance and no deeper secret than a jus­ti­fi­able dread of this kind. But this view does not account ade­quately for the sub­sti­tu­tive rela­tion between the eye and the male member which is seen to exist in dreams and myths and phan­tasies; nor can it dispel the impres­sion one gains that it is the threat of being cas­trated in espe­cial which excites a pecu­liarly vio­lent and obscure emo­tion, and that this emo­tion is what first gives the idea of losing other organs its intense colour­ing. All fur­ther doubts are removed when we get the details of their “cas­tra­tion-com­plex” from the analy­ses of neu­rotic patients, and real­ize its immense impor­tance in their mental life.

More­over, I would not rec­om­mend any oppo­nent of the psy­cho­an­a­lytic view to select pre­cisely the story of the Sand-Man upon which to build his case that morbid anx­i­ety about the eyes has noth­ing to do with the cas­tra­tion-com­plex. For why does Hoff­mann bring the anx­i­ety about eyes into such inti­mate con­nec­tion with the father’s death? And why does the Sand-Man appear each time in order to inter­fere with love? He divides the unfor­tu­nate Nathaniel from his betrothed and from her brother, his best friend; he destroys his second object of love, Olympia, the lovely doll; and he drives him into sui­cide at the moment when he has won back his Clara and is about to be hap­pily united to her. Things like these and many more seem arbi­trary and mean­ing­less in the story so long as we deny all con­nec­tion between fears about the eye and cas­tra­tion; but they become intel­li­gi­ble as soon as we replace the Sand-Man by the dreaded father at whose hands cas­tra­tion is awaited.⁸

We shall ven­ture, there­fore, to refer the uncanny effect of the Sand-Man to the child’s dread in rela­tion to its cas­tra­tion-com­plex. But having gained the idea that we can take this infan­tile factor to account for feel­ings of uncan­ni­ness, we are drawn to exam­ine whether we can apply it to other instances of uncanny things. We find in the story of the Sand-Man the other theme upon which Jentsch lays stress, of a doll that appears to be alive. Jentsch believes that a par­tic­u­larly favourable con­di­tion for awak­en­ing uncanny sen­sa­tions is cre­ated when there is intel­lec­tual uncer­tainty whether an object is alive or not, and when an ani­mate object becomes too much like an ani­mate one. Now, dolls happen to be rather closely con­nected with infan­tile life. We remem­ber that in their early games chil­dren do not dis­tin­guish at all sharply between living and life­less objects, and that they are espe­cially fond of treat­ing their dolls like live people. In fact I have occa­sion­ally heard a woman patient declare that even at the age of eight she had still been con­vinced that her dolls would be cer­tain to come to life if she were to look at them in a par­tic­u­lar way, with as con­cen­trated a gaze as pos­si­ble. So that here, too, it is not dif­fi­cult to dis­cover a factor from child­hood; but curi­ously enough, while the Sand-Man story deals with the exci­ta­tion of an early child­hood fear, the idea of a “living doll” excites no fear at all; the child had no fear of its doll coming to life, it may even have desired it. The source of the feel­ing of an uncanny thing would not, there­fore, be an infan­tile fear in this case, but rather an infan­tile wish or even only an infan­tile belief. There seems to be a con­tra­dic­tion here; but per­haps it is only a com­pli­ca­tion, which may be help­ful to us later on.

Hoff­mann is in lit­er­a­ture the unri­valled master of con­jur­ing up the uncanny. His Elixire des Teufels [The Devil’s Elixir] con­tains a mass of themes to which one is tempted to ascribe the uncanny effect of the nar­ra­tive; but it is too obscure and intri­cate a story to ven­ture to sum­ma­rize. Towards the end of the book the reader is told the facts, hith­erto con­cealed from him, from which the action springs; with the result, not that he is at last enlight­ened, but that he falls into a state of com­plete bewil­der­ment. The author has piled up too much of a kind; one’s com­pre­hen­sion of the whole suf­fers as a result, though not the impres­sion it makes. We must con­tent our­selves with select­ing those themes of uncan­ni­ness which are most prom­i­nent, and seeing whether we can fairly trace them also back to infan­tile sources. These themes are all con­cerned with the idea of a “double” in every shape and degree, with per­sons, there­fore, who are to be con­sid­ered iden­ti­cal by reason of look­ing alike; Hoff­mann accen­tu­ates this rela­tion by trans­fer­ring mental pro­cesses from the one person to the other—what we should call telepa­thy—so that the one pos­sesses knowl­edge, feel­ing and expe­ri­ence in common with the other, iden­ti­fies him­self with another person, so that his self becomes con­founded, or the for­eign self is sub­sti­tuted for his own—in other words, by dou­bling, divid­ing and inter­chang­ing the self. And finally there is the con­stant recur­rence of sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tions, a same face, or char­ac­ter-trait, or twist of for­tune, or a same crime, or even a same name recur­ring through­out sev­eral con­sec­u­tive gen­er­a­tions.

The theme of the “double” has been very thor­oughly treated by Otto Rank.⁹ He has gone into the con­nec­tions the “double” has with reflec­tions in mir­rors, with shad­ows, guardian spir­its, with the belief in the soul and the fear of death; but he also lets in a flood of light on the aston­ish­ing evo­lu­tion of this idea. For the “double” was orig­i­nally an insur­ance against destruc­tion to the ego, an “ener­getic denial of the power of death,” as Rank says; and prob­a­bly the “immor­tal” soul was the first “double” of the body. This inven­tion of dou­bling as a preser­va­tion against extinc­tion has its coun­ter­part in the lan­guage of dreams, which is fond of rep­re­sent­ing cas­tra­tion by a dou­bling or mul­ti­pli­ca­tion of the gen­i­tal symbol; the same desire spurred on the ancient Egyp­tians to the art of making images of the dead in some last­ing mate­rial. Such ideas, how­ever, have sprung from the soil of unbounded self-love, from the pri­mary nar­cis­sism which holds sway in the mind of the child as in that of prim­i­tive man; and when this stage has been left behind the double takes on a dif­fer­ent aspect. From having been an assur­ance of immor­tal­ity, he becomes the ghastly har­bin­ger of death.

The idea of the “double” does not nec­es­sar­ily dis­ap­pear with the pass­ing of the pri­mary nar­cis­sism, for it can receive fresh mean­ing from the later stages of devel­op­ment of the ego. A spe­cial fac­ulty is slowly formed there, able to oppose the rest of the ego, with the func­tion of observ­ing and crit­i­ciz­ing the self and exer­cis­ing a cen­sor­ship within the mind, and this we become aware of as our “con­science.” In the patho­log­i­cal case of delu­sions of being watched this mental insti­tu­tion becomes iso­lated, dis­so­ci­ated from the ego, and dis­cernible to a physi­cian’s eye. The fact that a fac­ulty of this kind exists, which is able to treat the rest of the ego like an object—the fact, that is, that man is capa­ble of self-obser­va­tion—ren­ders it pos­si­ble to invest the old idea of a “double” with a new mean­ing and to ascribe many things to it, above all, those things which seem to the new fac­ulty of self-crit­i­cism to belong to the old sur­mounted nar­cis­sism of the ear­li­est period of all.¹⁰

But it is not only this nar­cis­sism, offen­sive to the ego-crit­i­ciz­ing fac­ulty, which may be incor­po­rated in the idea of a double. There are also all those unful­filled but pos­si­ble futures to which we still like to cling in phan­tasy, all those striv­ings of the ego which adverse exter­nal cir­cum­stances have crushed, and all our sup­pressed acts of voli­tion which nour­ish in us the illu­sion of Free Will.¹¹

But, 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.¹²

It is not dif­fi­cult to judge, on the same lines as his theme of the “double,” the other forms of dis­tur­bance in the ego made use of by Hoff­mann. They are a hark­ing-back to par­tic­u­lar phases in the evo­lu­tion of the self-regard­ing feel­ing, a regres­sion to a time when the ego was not yet sharply dif­fer­en­ti­ated from the exter­nal world and from other per­sons. I believe that these fac­tors are partly respon­si­ble for the impres­sion of the uncanny, although it is not easy to iso­late and deter­mine exactly their share of it.

That factor which con­sists in a recur­rence of the same sit­u­a­tions, things and events, will per­haps not appeal to every­one as a source of uncanny feel­ing. From what I have observed, this phe­nom­e­non does undoubt­edly, sub­ject to cer­tain con­di­tions and com­bined with cer­tain cir­cum­stances, awaken an uncanny feel­ing, which recalls that sense of help­less­ness some­times expe­ri­enced in dreams. Once, as I was walk­ing through the deserted streets of a pro­vin­cial town in Italy which was strange to me, on a hot summer after­noon, I found myself in a quar­ter the char­ac­ter of which could not long remain in doubt. Noth­ing but painted women were to be seen at the win­dows of the small houses, and I has­tened to leave the narrow street at the next turn­ing. But after having wan­dered about for a while with­out being directed, I sud­denly found myself back in the same street, where my pres­ence was now begin­ning to excite atten­tion. I hur­ried away once more, but only to arrive yet a third time by devi­ous paths in the same place. Now, how­ever, a feel­ing over­came me which I can only describe as uncanny, and I was glad enough to aban­don my exploratory walk and get straight back to the piazza I had left a short while before. Other sit­u­a­tions having in common with my adven­ture an invol­un­tary return to the same sit­u­a­tion, but which differ rad­i­cally from it in other respects, also result in the same feel­ing of help­less­ness and of some­thing uncanny. As, for instance, when one is lost in a forest in high alti­tudes, caught, we will sup­pose, by the moun­tain mist, and when every endeavor to find the marked or famil­iar path ends again and again in a return to one and the same spot, rec­og­niz­able by some par­tic­u­lar land­mark. Or when one wan­ders about in a dark, strange room, look­ing for the door or the elec­tric switch, and col­lides for the hun­dredth time with the same piece of fur­ni­ture—a sit­u­a­tion which, indeed, has been made irre­sistibly comic by Mark Twain, through the wild extrav­a­gance of his nar­ra­tion.

Taking another class of things, it is easy to see that here, too, it is only this factor of invol­un­tary rep­e­ti­tion which sur­rounds with an uncanny atmos­phere what would oth­er­wise be inno­cent enough, and forces upon us the idea of some­thing fate­ful and unescapable where oth­er­wise we should have spoken of “chance” only. For instance, we of course attach no impor­tance to the event when we give up a coat and get a cloak­room ticket with the number, say, 62; or when we find that our cabin on board ship is num­bered 62. But the impres­sion is altered if two such events, each in itself indif­fer­ent, happen close together, if we come across the number 62 sev­eral times in a single day, or if we begin to notice that every­thing which has a number— addresses, hotel-rooms, com­part­ments in rail­way-trains— always has the same one, or one which at least con­tains the same fig­ures. We do feel this to be “uncanny,” and unless a man is utterly hard­ened and proof against the lure of super­sti­tion he will be tempted to ascribe a secret mean­ing to this obsti­nate recur­rence of a number, taking it, per­haps, as an indi­ca­tion of the span of life allot­ted to him. Or take the case that one is engaged at the time in read­ing the works of Hering, the famous phys­i­ol­o­gist, and then receives within the space of a few days two let­ters from two dif­fer­ent coun­tries, each from a person called Hering; whereas one has never before had any deal­ings with anyone of that name. Not long ago an inge­nious sci­en­tist attempted to reduce coin­ci­dences of this kind to cer­tain laws, and so deprive them of their uncanny effect.¹³ I will not ven­ture to decide whether he has suc­ceeded or not.

How exactly we can trace back the uncanny effect of such recur­rent sim­i­lar­i­ties to infan­tile psy­chol­ogy is a ques­tion I can only lightly touch upon in these pages; and I must refer the reader instead to another pam­phlet,¹⁴ now ready for pub­li­ca­tion, in which this has been gone into in detail, but in a dif­fer­ent con­nec­tion. It must be explained that we are able to pos­tu­late the prin­ci­ple of a rep­e­ti­tion-com­pul­sion in the uncon­scious mind, based upon instinc­tual activ­ity and prob­a­bly inher­ent in the very nature of the instincts—a prin­ci­ple pow­er­ful enough to over­rule the plea­sure-prin­ci­ple, lend­ing to cer­tain aspects of the mind their dae­monic char­ac­ter, and still very clearly expressed in the ten­den­cies of small chil­dren; a prin­ci­ple, too, which is respon­si­ble for a part of the course taken by the analy­ses of neu­rotic patients. Taken in all, the fore­go­ing pre­pares us for the dis­cov­ery that what­ever reminds us of this inner rep­e­ti­tion-com­pul­sion is per­ceived as uncanny.

Now, how­ever, it is time to turn from these aspects of the matter, which are in any case dif­fi­cult to decide upon, and look for unde­ni­able instances of the uncanny, in the hope that anal­y­sis of them will settle whether our hypoth­e­sis is a valid one.

In the story of “The Ring of Poly­crates,” the guest turns away from his friend with horror because he sees that his every wish is at once ful­filled, his every care imme­di­ately removed by kindly fate. His host has become “uncanny” to him. His own expla­na­tion, that the too for­tu­nate man has to fear the envy of the gods, seems still rather obscure to us; its mean­ing is veiled in mytho­log­i­cal lan­guage. We will there­fore turn to another exam­ple in a less grandiose set­ting. In the case his­tory of an obses­sional neu­rotic,¹⁵ I have described how the patient once stayed in a hydro­pathic estab­lish­ment and ben­e­fited greatly by it. He had the good sense, how­ever, to attribute his improve­ment not to the ther­a­peu­tic prop­er­ties of the water, but to the sit­u­a­tion of his room, which imme­di­ately adjoined that of very ami­able nurse. So on his second visit to the estab­lish­ment he asked for the same room but was told that it was already occu­pied by an old gen­tle­man, where­upon he gave vent to his annoy­ance in the words “Well, I hope he’ll have a stroke and die.” A fort­night later the old gen­tle­man really did have a stroke. My patient thought this an “uncanny” expe­ri­ence. And that impres­sion of uncan­ni­ness would have been stronger still if less time had elapsed between his excla­ma­tion and the unto­ward event, or if he had been able to pro­duce innu­mer­able sim­i­lar coin­ci­dences. As a matter of fact, he had no dif­fi­culty in pro­duc­ing coin­ci­dences of this sort, but then not only he but all obses­sional neu­rotics I have observed are able to relate anal­o­gous expe­ri­ences. They are never sur­prised when they invari­ably run up against the person they have just been think­ing of, per­haps for the first time for many months. If they say one day “I haven’t had news of so-and-so for a long time,” they will be sure to get a letter from him the next morn­ing. And an acci­dent or a death will rarely take place with­out having cast its shadow before on their minds. They are in the habit of men­tion­ing this state of affairs in the most modest manner, saying that they have “pre­sen­ti­ments” which “usu­ally” come true.

One of the most uncanny and wide-spread forms of super­sti­tion is the dread of the evil eye.¹⁶ There never seems to have been any doubt about the source of this dread. Who­ever pos­sesses some­thing at once valu­able and frag­ile is afraid of the envy of others, in that he projects on to them the envy he would have felt in their place. A feel­ing like this betrays itself in a look even though it is not put into words; and when a man attracts the atten­tion of others by notice­able, and par­tic­u­larly by unattrac­tive, attributes, they are ready to believe that his envy is rising to more than usual heights and that this inten­sity in it will con­vert it into effec­tive action. What is feared is thus a secret inten­tion of harm­ing some­one, and cer­tain signs are taken to mean that such an inten­tion is capa­ble of becom­ing an act.

These last exam­ples of the uncanny are to be referred to that prin­ci­ple in the mind which I have called “omnipo­tence of thoughts,” taking the name from an expres­sion used by one of my patients. And now we find our­selves on well-known ground. Our anal­y­sis of instances of the uncanny has led us back to the old, ani­mistic con­cep­tion of the uni­verse, which was char­ac­ter­ized by the idea that the world was peo­pled with the spir­its of human beings, and by the nar­cis­sis­tic over­es­ti­ma­tion of sub­jec­tive mental pro­cesses (such as the belief in the omnipo­tence of thoughts, the mag­i­cal prac­tices based upon this belief, the care­fully pro­por­tioned dis­tri­bu­tion of mag­i­cal powers or “mana” among var­i­ous out­side per­sons and things), as well as by all those other fig­ments of the imag­i­na­tion with which man, in the unre­stricted nar­cis­sism of that stage of devel­op­ment, strove to with­stand the inex­orable laws of real­ity. It would seem as though each one of us has been through a phase of indi­vid­ual devel­op­ment cor­re­spond­ing to that ani­mistic stage in prim­i­tive men, that none of us has tra­versed it with­out pre­serv­ing cer­tain traces of it which can be re-acti­vated, and that every­thing which now strikes us as “uncanny” ful­fils the con­di­tion of stir­ring those ves­tiges of ani­mistic mental activ­ity within us and bring­ing them to expres­sion.¹⁷

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 into its oppo­site das Unheim­liche;¹⁸ 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.

It only remains for us to test our new hypoth­e­sis on one or two more exam­ples of the uncanny.

Many people expe­ri­ence the feel­ing in the high­est degree in rela­tion to death and dead bodies, to the return of the dead, and to spir­its and ghosts. As we have seen, many lan­guages in use today can only render the German expres­sion “an unheim­liches house” by “a haunted house.” We might indeed have begun our inves­ti­ga­tion with this exam­ple, per­haps the most strik­ing of all, of some­thing uncanny, but we refrained from doing so because the uncanny in it is too much min­gled with and in part cov­ered by what is purely grue­some. There is scarcely any other matter, how­ever, upon which our thoughts and feel­ings have changed so little since the very ear­li­est times, and in which dis­carded forms have been so com­pletely pre­served under a thin dis­guise, as that of our rela­tion to death. Two things account for our con­ser­vatism: the strength of our orig­i­nal emo­tional reac­tion to it, and the insuf­fi­ciency of our sci­en­tific knowl­edge about it. Biol­ogy has not yet been able to decide whether death is the inevitable fate of every living being or whether it is only a reg­u­lar but yet per­haps avoid­able event in life. It is true that the propo­si­tion “All men are mortal” is paraded in text-books of logic as an exam­ple of a gen­er­al­iza­tion, but no human being really grasps it, and our uncon­scious has as little use now as ever for the idea of its own mor­tal­ity. Reli­gions con­tinue to dis­pute the unde­ni­able fact of the death of each one of us and to pos­tu­late a life after death; civil gov­ern­ments still believe that they cannot main­tain moral order among the living if they do not uphold this prospect of a better life after death as a rec­om­pense for earthly exis­tence. In our great cities, plac­ards announce lec­tures which will tell us how to get into touch with the souls of the departed; and it cannot be denied that many of the most able and pen­e­trat­ing minds among our sci­en­tific men have come to the con­clu­sion, espe­cially towards the close of their lives, that a con­tact of this kind is not utterly impos­si­ble. Since prac­ti­cally all of us still think as sav­ages do on this topic, it is no matter for sur­prise that the prim­i­tive fear of the dead is still so strong within us and always ready to come to the sur­face at any oppor­tu­nity. Most likely our fear still con­tains the old belief that the deceased becomes the enemy of his sur­vivor and wants to carry him off to share his new life with him. Con­sid­er­ing our unchanged atti­tude towards death, we might rather inquire what has become of the repres­sion, that nec­es­sary con­di­tion for enabling a prim­i­tive feel­ing to recur in the shape of an uncanny effect. But repres­sion is there, too. All so-called edu­cated people have ceased to believe, offi­cially at any rate, that the dead can become vis­i­ble as spir­its, and have hedged round any such appear­ances with improb­a­ble and remote cir­cum­stances; their emo­tional atti­tude towards their dead, more­over, once a highly dubi­ous and ambiva­lent one, has been toned down in the higher strata of the mind into a simple feel­ing of rev­er­ence.¹⁹

We have now only a few more remarks to add, for ani­mism, magic and witch­craft, the omnipo­tence of thoughts, man’s atti­tude to death, invol­un­tary rep­e­ti­tion and the cas­tra­tion-com­plex com­prise prac­ti­cally all the fac­tors which turn some­thing fear­ful into an uncanny thing.

We also call a living person uncanny, usu­ally when we ascribe evil motives to him. But that is not all; we must not only credit him with bad inten­tions but must attribute to these inten­tions capac­ity to achieve their aim in virtue of cer­tain spe­cial powers. A good instance of this is the “Get­ta­tore,” that uncanny figure of Roman super­sti­tion which Scha­ef­fer, with intu­itive poetic feel­ing and pro­found psy­cho­an­a­lytic knowl­edge, has trans­formed into a sym­pa­thetic figure in his Josef Mont­fort. But the ques­tion of these secret powers brings us back again to the realm of ani­mism. It is her intu­ition that he pos­sesses secret power of this kind that makes Mephistophe­les so uncanny to the pious Gretchen.

“She divines that I am cer­tainly a spirit,
even the devil him­self per­chance.”²⁰

The uncanny effect of epilepsy and of mad­ness has the same origin. The ordi­nary person sees in them the work­ings of forces hith­erto unsus­pected in his fellow-man but which at the same time he is dimly aware of in a remote corner of his own being. The Middle Ages quite con­sis­tently ascribed all such mal­adies to dae­monic influ­ences, and in this their psy­chol­ogy was not so far out. Indeed, I should not be sur­prised to hear that psy­cho­anal­y­sis, which con­cerned with laying bare these hidden forces, has itself become uncanny to many people for that very reason. In one case, after I had suc­ceeded—though none too rapidly—in effect­ing a cure which had lasted many years in a girl who had been an invalid, the patient’s own mother con­fessed to this atti­tude long after the girl’s recov­ery.

Dis­mem­bered limbs, a sev­ered head, a hand cut off at the wrist,²¹ feet which dance by them­selves²²—all these have some­thing pecu­liarly uncanny about them, espe­cially when, as in the last instance, they prove able to move of them­selves in addi­tion. As we already know, this kind of uncan­ni­ness springs from its asso­ci­a­tion with the cas­tra­tion-com­plex. To many people the idea of being buried alive while appear­ing to be dead is the most uncanny thing of all. And yet psy­cho­anal­y­sis has taught us that this ter­ri­fy­ing phan­tasy is only a trans­for­ma­tion of another phan­tasy which had orig­i­nally noth­ing ter­ri­fy­ing about it at all, but was filled with a cer­tain lust­ful plea­sure—the phan­tasy, I mean, of intra-uter­ine exis­tence.

There is one more point of gen­eral appli­ca­tion I should like to add, though, strictly speak­ing, it has been included in our state­ments about ani­mism and mech­a­nisms in the mind that have been sur­mounted; for I think it deserves spe­cial men­tion. This is that an uncanny effect is often and easily pro­duced by effac­ing the dis­tinc­tion between imag­i­na­tion and real­ity, such as when some­thing that we have hith­erto regarded as imag­i­nary appears before us in real­ity, or when a symbol takes over the full func­tions and sig­nif­i­cance of the thing it sym­bol­izes, and so on. It is this ele­ment which con­trib­utes not a little to the uncanny effect attach­ing to mag­i­cal prac­tices. The infan­tile ele­ment in this, which also holds sway in the minds of neu­rotics, is the over-accen­tu­a­tion of psy­chi­cal real­ity in com­par­i­son with phys­i­cal real­ity—a fea­ture closely allied to the belief in the omnipo­tence of thoughts. In the midst of the iso­la­tion of war-time a number of the Eng­lish Strand Mag­a­zine fell into my hands; and, amongst other not very inter­est­ing matter, I read a story about a young mar­ried couple, who move into a fur­nished flat in which there is a curi­ously shaped table with carv­ings of croc­o­diles on it. Towards evening they begin to smell an intol­er­a­ble and very typ­i­cal odour that per­vades the whole flat; things begin to get in their way and trip them up in the dark­ness; they seem to see a vague form glid­ing up the stairs—in short, we are given to under­stand that the pres­ence of the table causes ghostly croc­o­diles to haunt the place, or that the wooden mon­sters come to life in the dark, or some­thing of that sort. It was a thor­oughly silly story, but the uncanny feel­ing it pro­duced was quite remark­able.

To con­clude this col­lec­tion of exam­ples, which is cer­tainly not com­plete, I will relate an instance taken from psy­cho­an­a­lyt­i­cal expe­ri­ence; if it does not rest upon mere coin­ci­dence, it fur­nishes a beau­ti­ful con­fir­ma­tion of our theory of the uncanny. It often hap­pens that male patients declare that they feel there is some­thing uncanny about the female gen­i­tal organs. This unheim­lich place, how­ever, is the entrance to the former heim [home] of all human beings, to the place where every­one dwelt once upon a time and in the begin­ning. There is a humor­ous saying: “Love is home-sick­ness”; and when­ever a man dreams of a place or a coun­try and says to him­self, still in the dream, “this place is famil­iar to me, I have been there before,” we may inter­pret the place as being his mother’s gen­i­tals or her body. In this case, too, the unheim­lich is what was once heimisch, home­like, famil­iar; the prefix ‘‘un’’ is the token of repres­sion.

Ⅲ

Having fol­lowed the dis­cus­sion as far as this the reader will have felt cer­tain doubts aris­ing in his mind about much that has been said; and he must now have an oppor­tu­nity of col­lect­ing them and bring­ing them for­ward.

It may be true that the uncanny is noth­ing else than a hidden, famil­iar thing that has under­gone repres­sion and then emerged from it, and that every­thing that is uncanny ful­fils this con­di­tion. But these fac­tors do not solve the prob­lem of the uncanny. For our propo­si­tion is clearly not con­vert­ible. Not every­thing that ful­fils 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.

Nor would we, more­over, con­ceal the fact that for almost every exam­ple adduced in sup­port of our hypoth­e­sis some other anal­o­gous one may be found which rebuts it. The story of the sev­ered hand in Hauff’s fairy-tale cer­tainly has an uncanny effect, and we have derived that effect from the cas­tra­tion-com­plex. But in the story in Herodotus of the trea­sure of Rhampsen­i­tus, where the master-thief leaves his brother’s sev­ered hand behind him in that of the princess who wants to hold him fast, most read­ers will agree with me that the episode has no trace of uncan­ni­ness. Again, the instant ful­fill­ment of the king’s wishes in “The Ring of Poly­crates” undoubt­edly does affect us in the same uncanny way as it did the king of Egypt. Yet our own fairy-tales are crammed with instan­ta­neous wish-ful­fill­ments which pro­duce no uncanny effect what­ever. In the story of “The Three Wishes,” the woman is tempted by the savoury smell of a sausage to wish that she might have one too, and imme­di­ately it lies on a plate before her. In his annoy­ance at her for­ward­ness her hus­band wishes it may hang on her nose. And there it is, dan­gling from her nose. All this, is very vivid but not in the least uncanny. Fairy-tales quite frankly adopt the ani­mistic stand­point of the omnipo­tence of thoughts and wishes, and yet I cannot think of any gen­uine fairy-story which has any­thing uncanny about it. We have heard that it is in the high­est degree uncanny when inan­i­mate objects—a pic­ture or a doll—come to life; nev­er­the­less in Hans Ander­sen’s sto­ries the house­hold uten­sils, fur­ni­ture and tin sol­diers are alive and noth­ing could per­haps be more remote from the uncanny. And we should hardly call it uncanny when Pyg­malion’s beau­ti­ful statue comes to life.

Catalepsy and the re-ani­ma­tion of the dead have been rep­re­sented as most uncanny themes. But things of this sort again are very common in fairy-sto­ries. Who would be so bold as to call it an uncanny moment, for instance, when Snow-White opens her eyes once more? And the resus­ci­ta­tion of the dead in mir­a­cles, as in the New Tes­ta­ment, elic­its feel­ings quite unre­lated to the uncanny. Then the theme that achieves such an indu­bitably uncanny effect, the invol­un­tary recur­rence of the like, serves, too, other and quite dif­fer­ent pur­poses in another class of cases. One case we have already heard about in which it is employed to call forth a feel­ing of the comic; and we could mul­ti­ply instances of this kind. Or again, it works as a means of empha­sis, and so on. Another con­sid­er­a­tion is this: whence come the uncanny influ­ences of silence, dark­ness and soli­tude? Do not these fac­tors point to the part played by danger in the aeti­ol­ogy of what is uncanny, not­with­stand­ing that they are also the most fre­quent accom­pa­ni­ment of the expres­sion of fear in infancy? And are we in truth jus­ti­fied in entirely ignor­ing intel­lec­tual uncer­tainty as a factor, seeing that we have admit­ted its impor­tance in rela­tion to death?

It is evi­dent that we must be pre­pared to admit that there are other ele­ments besides those set down here deter­min­ing the pro­duc­tion of uncanny feel­ings. We might say that these pre­lim­i­nary results have sat­is­fied psy­cho­an­a­lytic inter­est in the prob­lem of the uncanny, and that what remains prob­a­bly calls for an aes­thetic val­u­a­tion. But that would be to open the door to doubts about the exact value of our gen­eral con­tention that the uncanny pro­ceeds from some­thing famil­iar which has been repressed.

One thing we may observe which may help us to resolve these uncer­tain­ties: nearly all the instances which con­tra­dict our hypoth­e­sis are taken from the realm of fic­tion and lit­er­ary pro­duc­tions. This may sug­gest a pos­si­ble dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion between the uncanny that is actu­ally expe­ri­enced, and the uncanny as we merely pic­ture it or read about it.

Some­thing uncanny in real expe­ri­ence is con­di­tioned much more simply, but is lim­ited to much fewer occa­sions. We shall find, I think, that it fits in per­fectly with our attempt at solu­tion, and can be traced back with­out excep­tion to some­thing famil­iar that has been repressed. But here, too, we must make a cer­tain impor­tant and psy­cho­log­i­cally sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion in our mate­rial, best illus­trated by turn­ing to suit­able exam­ples.

Let us take the uncanny in con­nec­tion with the omnipo­tence of thoughts, instan­ta­neous wish-ful­fill­ments, secret power to do harm and the return of the dead. The con­di­tion under which the feel­ing of uncan­ni­ness arises here is unmis­tak­able. We—or our prim­i­tive fore­fa­thers—once believed in the pos­si­bil­ity of these things and were con­vinced that they really hap­pened. Nowa­days we no longer believe in them, we have sur­mounted such ways of thought; but we do not feel quite sure of our new set of beliefs, and the old ones still exist within us ready to seize upon any con­fir­ma­tion. As soon as some­thing actu­ally hap­pens in our lives which seems to sup­port the old, dis­carded beliefs, we get a feel­ing of the uncanny; and it is as though we were making a judg­ment some­thing like this: “So, after all, it is true that one can kill a person by merely desir­ing his death!” or, “Then the dead do con­tinue to live and appear before our eyes on the scene of their former activ­i­ties!”, and so on. And con­versely, he who has com­pletely and finally dis­pelled ani­mistic beliefs in him­self, will be insen­si­ble to this type of the uncanny. The most remark­able coin­ci­dences of desire and ful­fill­ment, the most mys­te­ri­ous recur­rence of sim­i­lar expe­ri­ences in a par­tic­u­lar place or on a par­tic­u­lar date, the most decep­tive sights and sus­pi­cious noises—none of these things will take him in or raise that kind of fear which can be described as “a fear of some­thing uncanny.” For the whole matter is one of “test­ing real­ity,” pure and simple, a ques­tion of the mate­rial real­ity of the phe­nom­ena.²³

The state of affairs is some­what dif­fer­ent when the uncanny pro­ceeds from repressed infan­tile com­plexes, from the cas­tra­tion-com­plex, womb-phan­tasies, etc.; but expe­ri­ences which arouse this kind of uncanny feel­ing are not of very fre­quent occur­rence in real life. Actual occur­rences of the uncanny belong for the most part to the first group; nev­er­the­less the dis­tinc­tion between the two is the­o­ret­i­cally very impor­tant. 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. Finally, we must not let our predilec­tion for smooth solu­tion and lucid expo­si­tion blind us to the fact that these two classes of uncanny expe­ri­ence are not always sharply dis­tin­guish­able. When we con­sider that prim­i­tive beliefs are most inti­mately con­nected with infan­tile com­plexes, and are, in fact, based upon them, we shall not be greatly aston­ished to find the dis­tinc­tion often rather a hazy one.

The uncanny as it is depicted in lit­er­a­ture, in sto­ries and imag­i­na­tive pro­duc­tions, merits in truth a sep­a­rate dis­cus­sion. To begin with, it is a much more fer­tile prov­ince than the uncanny in real life, for it con­tains the whole of the latter and some­thing more besides, some­thing that cannot be found in real life. The dis­tinc­tion between what has been repressed and what has been sur­mounted cannot be trans­posed on to the uncanny in fic­tion with­out pro­found mod­i­fi­ca­tion; for the realm of phan­tasy depends for its very exis­tence on the fact that its con­tent is not sub­mit­ted to the real­ity-test­ing fac­ulty. The some­what para­dox­i­cal result is that in the first place a great deal that is not uncanny in fic­tion would be so if it hap­pened in real life; and in the second place that there are many more means of cre­at­ing uncanny effects in fic­tion than there are in real life.

The story-teller has this license among many others, that he can select his world of rep­re­sen­ta­tion so that it either coin­cides with the real­i­ties we are famil­iar with or departs from them in what par­tic­u­lars he pleases. We accept his ruling in every case. In fairy-tales, for instance, the world of real­ity is left behind from the very start, and the ani­mistic system of beliefs is frankly adopted. Wish-ful­fill­ments, secret powers, omnipo­tence of thoughts, ani­ma­tion of life­less objects, all the ele­ments so common in fairy-sto­ries, can exert no uncanny influ­ence here; for, as we have learnt, that feel­ing cannot arise unless there is a con­flict of judge­ment whether things which have been “sur­mounted” and are regarded as incred­i­ble are not, after all, pos­si­ble; and this prob­lem is excluded from the begin­ning by the set­ting of the story. And thus we see that such sto­ries as have fur­nished us with most of the con­tra­dic­tions to our hypoth­e­sis of the uncanny con­firm the first part of our propo­si­tion—that in the realm of fic­tion many things are not uncanny which would be so if they hap­pened in real life. In the case of the fairy-story there are other con­trib­u­tory fac­tors, which we shall briefly touch upon later.

The story-teller can also choose a set­ting which, though less imag­i­nary than the world of fairy tales, does yet differ from the real world by admit­ting supe­rior spir­i­tual enti­ties such as dae­monic influ­ences or departed spir­its. So long as they remain within their set­ting of poetic real­ity their usual attribute of uncan­ni­ness fails to attach to such beings. The souls in Dante’s Inferno, or the ghostly appari­tions in Hamlet, Mac­beth or Julius Caesar, may be gloomy and ter­ri­ble enough, but they are no more really uncanny than is Homer’s jovial world of gods. We order our judge­ment to the imag­i­nary real­ity imposed on us by the writer, and regard souls, spir­its and spec­tres as though their exis­tence had the same valid­ity in their world as our own has in the exter­nal world. And then in this case too we are spared all trace of the uncanny.

The sit­u­a­tion is altered as soon as the writer pre­tends to move in the world of common real­ity. In this case he accepts all the con­di­tions oper­at­ing to pro­duce uncanny feel­ings in real life; and every­thing that would have an uncanny effect in real­ity has it in his story. But in this case, too, he can increase his effect and mul­ti­ply it far beyond what could happen in real­ity, by bring­ing about events which never or very rarely happen in fact. He takes advan­tage, as it were, of our sup­pos­edly sur­mounted super­sti­tious­ness; he deceives us into think­ing that he is giving us the sober truth, and then after all over­steps the bounds of pos­si­bil­ity. We react to his inven­tions as we should have reacted to real expe­ri­ences; by the time we have seen through his trick it is already too late and the author has achieved his object; but it must be added that his suc­cess is not unal­loyed. We retain a feel­ing of dis­sat­is­fac­tion, a kind of grudge against the attempted deceit; I have noticed this par­tic­u­larly after read­ing Schnit­zler’s Die Weis­sa­gung and sim­i­lar sto­ries which flirt with the super­nat­u­ral. The writer has then one more means he can use to escape our rising vex­a­tion and at the same time to improve his chances of suc­cess. It is this, that he should keep us in the dark for a long time about the pre­cise nature of the con­di­tions he has selected for the world he writes about, or that he should cun­ningly and inge­niously avoid any def­i­nite infor­ma­tion on the point at all through­out the book. Speak­ing gen­er­ally, how­ever, we find a con­fir­ma­tion of the second part of our propo­si­tion—that fic­tion presents more oppor­tu­ni­ties for cre­at­ing uncanny sen­sa­tions than are pos­si­ble in real life.

Strictly speak­ing, all these com­pli­ca­tions relate only to that class of the uncanny which pro­ceeds from forms of thought that have been sur­mounted. The class which pro­ceeds from repressed com­plexes is more irrefragable and remains as pow­er­ful in fic­tion as in real expe­ri­ence, except in one point. The uncanny belong­ing to the first class— that pro­ceed­ing from forms of thought that have been sur­mounted—retains this qual­ity in fic­tion as in expe­ri­ence so long as the set­ting is one of phys­i­cal real­ity; but as soon as it is given an arbi­trary and unre­al­is­tic set­ting in fic­tion, it is apt to lose its qual­ity of the uncanny.

It is clear that we have not exhausted the pos­si­bil­i­ties of poetic license and the priv­i­leges enjoyed by sto­ry­writ­ers in evok­ing or in exclud­ing an uncanny feel­ing. In the main we adopt an unvary­ing pas­sive atti­tude towards expe­ri­ence and are acted upon by our phys­i­cal envi­ron­ment. But the story-teller has a pecu­liarly direc­tive influ­ence over us; by means of the states of mind into which he can put us and the expec­ta­tions he can rouse in us, he is able to guide the cur­rent of our emo­tions, dam it up in one direc­tion and make it flow in another, and he often obtains a great vari­ety of effects from the same mate­rial. All this is noth­ing new, and has doubt­less long since been fully taken into account by pro­fes­sors of aes­thet­ics. We have drifted into this field of research half invol­un­tar­ily, through the temp­ta­tion to explain cer­tain instances which con­tra­dicted our theory of the causes of the uncanny. And accord­ingly we will now return to the exam­i­na­tion of a few instances.

We have already asked why it is that the sev­ered hand in the story of the trea­sure of Rhainpsen­i­tus has no uncanny effect in the way that Hauff’s story of the sev­ered hand has. The ques­tion seems to us to have gained in impor­tance now that we have rec­og­nized that class of the uncanny which pro­ceeds from repressed com­plexes to be the more durable of the two. The answer is easy. In the Herodotus story our thoughts are con­cen­trated much more on the supe­rior cun­ning of the master-thief than on the feel­ings of the princess. The princess may well have had an uncanny feel­ing, indeed she very prob­a­bly fell into a swoon; but we have no such sen­sa­tions, for we put our­selves in the thief’s place, not in hers. In Nestroy’s farce, Der Zer­ris­sene, another means is used to avoid any impres­sion of the uncanny in the scene in which the flee­ing man, con­vinced that he is a mur­derer, lifts up one trap­door after another and each time sees what he takes to be the ghost of his victim rising up out of it. He calls out in despair, “But I’ve only killed one man. Why this horrid mul­ti­pli­ca­tion?” We know the truth and do not share the error of the Zer­ris­sener, so what must be uncanny to him has an irre­sistibly comic effect on us. Even a “real” ghost, as in Oscar Wilde’s Can­ter­ville Ghost, loses all power of arous­ing at any rate an uncanny horror in us as soon as the author begins to amuse him­self at its expense and allows lib­er­ties to be taken with it. Thus we see how inde­pen­dent emo­tional effects can be of the actual sub­ject matter in the world of fic­tion. In fairy-sto­ries feel­ings of fear—includ­ing uncanny sen­sa­tions—are ruled out alto­gether. We under­stand this, and that is why we ignore the oppor­tu­ni­ties we find for any devel­op­ment of a feel­ing of this kind.

Con­cern­ing the fac­tors of silence, soli­tude and dark­ness, we can only say that they are actu­ally ele­ments in the pro­duc­tion of that infan­tile morbid anx­i­ety from which the major­ity of human beings have never become quite free. This prob­lem has been dis­cussed from a psy­cho­an­a­lyt­i­cal point of view in another place.