supplement reading

Thomas Keirstead

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we consult Grimms' dictionary (1877, 4, Part 2, 873 ff.). We read:

Heimlich; adj. and adv. ''emaculus, occultus; MHG. heimelich, hcimlich.

(P. 874.) In a slightly different sense: 'I feel heimlich, well, free from fear' ...

[3} (b) Heimlich is also used ot a place free from ghostly in- fluences ... familiar, friendly, intimate.

(P. 875: /3) Familiar, amicable, unreserved. 4· From tlte idea of1 lzomelike', 'belonging to the house', tire further

idea is developed of something withdrawn from the eyes of strangers, something cmuealed, secret; and this idea is expanded in many ways ...

(P. 876.) 'On the left bank of the lake there lies a heimlich in the wood.' (Schiller, Wilhelm Tell, l.4.) ... PoetiC licence. rarely so used in modem speech ... Heimlich is used in conjunction with a verb expressing the act of concealing: 'In the secret ofhis tabernacle he shall hide me heimlich.' (Psalms, xxvii, 5.) ... Heimlich parts of the human body, pudenda ... 'the men that died not were smitten on their lteimlich parts.' (1 Samuel, v, 12.) ...

(c) Officials who give important advice which has to be kept secret in matters of state are called heimliciJ councillors; the adjective, according to modem usage, has been replaced by geheim [secret] ... 'Pharaoh called joseph's name "hin1 to whom secrets are revealed"' (heimlich councillor). (Genesis xli, 45-)

(P. 878.) 6. Heimlich, as used of knowledge - mystic, alle- gorical: a heimlich meaning, mysticus, ilivinus,

(P. 8,78.) Heimlich in a different sense, as wtthdrawn_ from knowledge, unconscious ... Heimlich also has the meamng of that which is obscure, inaccessible to knowledge . -. 'Do you not see? They do not trust us; they fear the lleimlich face of the Duke ofFriedland.' (Schiller, Wallensteins Lager, Scene 2.)

9· The notion of something hidden and datJgerous, 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

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believes in ghosts; every comer is heimlicll and full of terrors for him'. (Klinger, Theater, 3, 298.)

Thus lteimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, ttnheimlich. Unheimliclz is in some way or other a sub- species of heimlich. Let us bear this discovery in mind, though we cannot yet rightly understand it, alongside of Schelling's definition of the Unheimlich. If we go on to examine individual instances of uncanniness, these hints will become intelligible to us.

II

When we proceed to review the things, persons, impressions, events and situations which arc able to arouse in us a feeling of the uncanny in a particularly forcible and definite form, the first is obviously to select a suitable example to start on. Jentsch has taken as a very good instance 'doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or con- versely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate'; and he refers in this connection to the impression made by waxwork figures, ingeniously constructed dolls and automata. To these he adds the uncanny effect of epileptic fits, and of manifestations of insanity, because these excite in the spectator the irppression of automatic, mechanical processes at work behind the ordinary appearance of mental activity. Without entirely accepting this author's view, we will take it as a starting-point for our own investigation because in what follows he reminds us of a writer who has succeeded m producing uncanny effects better than anyone else.

Jentsch writes: '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 focused directly upon his uncertainty, so that

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he may not be led to go into the matter and clear it up immediately. That, as we have said, would quickly dissipate the peculiar emotional effect of the thing. E. T. A. 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 Nachtstucken, 1 which contains the original of Olympia, the doll that appears in the first act of Offenbach's opera, Tales of Hoffmann. But I cannot think - and I hope 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, or in- deed the most important, element that must be held responsible for the quite unparalleled atmosphere of uncanniness evoked by the story. Nor is this atmosphere heightened by the fact that the author himself treats the episode of Olympia with a faint touch of satire and uses it to poke fun at the young man's idealization of his mistress. The main theme of the story is, on the contrary, something different, something which gives it its name, and which is always re-introduced at critical moments: it is the theme of the 'Sand-Man' who tears out children's eyes.

This fantastic tale opens 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 his beloved father. 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 treaa of a visitor, with whom his father would then be occupied for the evening. When questioned about' the Sand-Man, his mother, it is true, denied that such a person existed except as a figure of speech; but his nurse could give him more definite information: 'He's a wicked

1. Hoffmann's Siimtliche Werke, Grisebach edition,]. [A translation of'The Sand-Man' is included in Eight Tales of Hoffmann, translated by J. M. Cohen, London, Pan Books, 1952.]

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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 half-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 credit the figure of the Sand-Man with such gruesome attributes, yet the dread of him became fixed in his heart. He determined to find out what the Sand-Man looked like; and one evening, when the Sand-Man was expected again, he hid in his father's study. He recognized the visitor as lawyer Coppelius, a repulsive person whom the children were frightened of when he occasionally came to a meal; and he now identified this Coppelius with the dreaded Sand-Man. As regards the rest of the scene, Hoffmann already leaves us in doubt whether what we are witnessing is 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 are at work at a brazier with glowing flames. The little eaves- dropper hears Coppelius call out: £Eyes here! Eyes here!' and betrays himself by screaming aloud. Coppelius seizes him and is on the point of dropping bits of red-hot coal from the fire into his eyes, and then of throwing them into the brazier, but his father begs him off and saves his eyes. After this the boy falls into a deep swoon; and a long illness brings his experience to an end. Those who decide in favour of the rationalistic interpretation of the Sand-Man will not fail to recognize in the child's phantasy the persisting influence of his nurse's story. The bits of sand that are to be thrown into the child's eyes tum into bits of red-hot coal from the flames; and in both cases they are intended to make his eyes jump out. In the course of another visit of the Sand-Man's, a year later, his father is killed in his study by an explosion. The lawyer Cop- pelius disappears from the place without leaving a trace behind.

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We shall venture, therefore, to refer the uncanny effect of the Sand-Man to the anxiety belonging to the castration complex of childhood. But having reached the idea that we can make an infantile factor such as this responsible for feelings of uncanniness, we are encouraged to see whether we can apply it to other instances of the uncanny. We find in the story of the Sand-Man the other theme on which Jentsch lays stress, of a doll which appears to be alive. Jentsch believes that a particularly favourable condition for awakening uncanny feelings is created when there is intellectual uncertainty whether an object is alive or not, and when an inanimate object becomes too much like an animate one. Now, dolls are of course rather closely connected with childhood life. We remember that in

Coppelius, after sparing Nathaniel's eyes, had screwed off his arms and legs as an experiment; that is, he had worked on him as a mechanician would on a doll. This singular feature, which seems quite outside the picture of the Sand-Man, introduces a new castration equivalent; but it also points to the inner identity of Coppelius with his later counterpart. Spalanzani the mechanician, and prepares us for the interpretation of Olympia. This automatic doll can be nothing else than a materialization of NathanieJ>s feminine attitude towards his father in his infancy. Her fathers, Spalanzani and Coppola, arc, after all, nothing but new editions, reincarnations of Nathaniel's pair offathcrs. Spalanzani's otherwise incomprehensible statement that the optician has stolen Nathaniel's eyes (sec above [p. 350]}, so as to set them in the dolJ. now becomes significant as supplying evidence of the identity of Olympia and Nathaniel. Olympia is, as it were, a dissociated complex of Nathaniel's which confronts him as a person. and Nathaniel's enslavement to this complex is expressed in his senseless obsessive love for Olympia. We may with justice call love of this kind narcissistic, and we can understand why someone who has fallen victim to it should relinquish the real, external object of his love. The psychological truth of the situation in which the young man, fixated upon his father by his castration complex, becomes incapable ofloving a woman, is amply proved by numerous analyses of patients whose story, though less fantastic, is hardly less tragic than that of the student Nathaniel.

Hoffmann was the child. of an unhappy marriage. When he was three years old, his father left his small family, and was never united to them again. According to Grisebach, in his biographical introduction to Hoffmann's works, the writer's relation to his father was always a most sensitive subject with him.

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their early games· children do not distinguish at all sharply between living and inanimate 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, extremely concentrated, way. 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 arousing of an early childhood fear, the idea of a 'living doll' excites no fear at all; children have no fear of their dolls coming to life, they may even desire it. The source of uncanny feelings would not, therefore, be an infantile fear in this case, but rather an infantile wish or even merely 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 the unrivalled master of the uncanny in litera- ture. His novel, Die Elixiere des Teufels [The Devil's Elixir], contains a whole mass of themes to which one is tempted to ascribe the uncanny effect of the narrative; 1 but it is too obscure and intricate a story for us to venture upon a summary of it. Towards the end of the book the reader is told the facts, hitherto concealed from him, from which the a<;tion springs; with the

1. [Under the rubric 'Varia' in one of the issues of the llltemaliotaale Zcitscllriftfiir Psycl10at1alyse for 1919 (s. 308), the year in which the present paper was first published, there appears over the initials 'S.F.' a short note which it is not unreasonable to attribute to Freud. Its insertion here, though strictly speaking irrelevant, may perhaps be excused. The note is headed: 'E. T. A. Hoffmann on the Function of Consciousness' and it proceeds: 'In Die Elixiere des Teufels (Part 11, p. 210, in Hesse's edition) - a novel rich in masterly descriptions of pathological mental states - Schonfeld comforts the hero, whose consciousness is temporarily disturbed, with the following words: "And what do you get out of it? I mean qut of the particular mental function which we call consciousness, and which is nothing but the con- founded activity of a damned toll-collector - excise-man - deputy-chief customs officer, who has set up his infamous bureau in our top storey and who exclaims, whenever any goods try to get out: 'Hi! hi! exports arc prohibited ... they must stay here ... here, in this country ... .'"')

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' THE 'UNCANNY' 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 material of the same kind. In consequence one's grasp of the story as a whole suffers, though not the impression it makes. We must content ourselves with selecting those themes of uncanniness which are most prominent, and with seeing whether they too can fairly be traced back to infantile sources. These themes are all concerned with the phenomenon of the 'double', which appears in every shape and in every degree of development. Thus we have characters who are to be con- sidered identical because they look alike. This relation is accentuated by mental processes leaping from one of these characters to another - by what we should call telepathy - so that the one possesses knowledge, feelings and experience in common with the other. Or it is marked by the fact that the subject identifies himself with someone else, so that he is in doubt as to which his self is, or substitutes the extraneous self for his own. In other words, there is a doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self. And finally there is the constant recurrence of the same thing 1 - the repetition of the same features or character-traits or vicissitudes, of the same crimes, or even the same names through several consecutive genera- tions.

The theme of the 'double' has been very thoroughly treated by Otto Rank (1914). He has gone into the connections which the 'double' has with reflections in mirrors, with shadows, with guardian spirits, with the belief in the soul and with the fear of death; but he also lets in a flood of light on the surprising evolution of the idea. For the 'double' was originally an insurance against the destruction of the ego, an 'energetic denial of the power of death', as Rank says; and probably the 'im- mortal' soul was the first 'double' of the body. This invention of doubling as a preservation against extinction has its counter-

1. (This phrase seems to be an echo from Nietzsche (e.g. from the last part of Also Sprach Zarathustra). In Beyorrd tire Pleasure Principle (192og), P.F.L., II, 292, Freud puts a similar phrase, 'this perpetual recurrence of the same thing', into inverted commas.]

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part in the language of dreams, which is fond of castration by a doubling or a multiplication ot a v.•"llttlll symbol.l The same desire led the Ancient tt.) dcvd• •P the art of making images of the dead in lastmg matcna k Sill II ideas, however, have sprung from the soil of unbouudl'd wll-. love, from the primary narcissism which dominates the 1111tul of the child and of primitive man. But when this sta!-';l' la,t\ been surmounted, the 'double' reverses its aspect. From havi11g been an assurance of immortality, it becotnes the unc'"''Y harbinger of death. . . .

The idea of the 'double' does not necessanly dtsappear wtth the passing of primary narcissism, for it can receive fresh ing from the later stages of the ego's development. A spcnal agency is slowly formed there, which is abl: to stand o:t·r against the rest of the ego, which has the function of and criticizing the self and of exercising a censorship w1thm the mind, and which we become aware of as our 'consciencl'' · In the pathological case of delusions of observation, this agency becomes isolated, dissociated from the ego, and cernible to the physician's eye. The fact that an agency tlus kind exists, which is able to treat the rest of the ego hke an object- the fact, that is, that man is capable of self-observation - renders it possible to invest the old idea of a 'double' wilh a new meaning and to ascribe a number of things to it - abovt· all, those things which seem to self-criticism to belong to thc old surmounted narcissism of earliest times. 2

1. (Cf. Tire ofDrecrms (1900a), J>.F.L., 4, 474-) . 2. I believe that when poets complain that two souls dwell m the human

breast. and when popular psychologists talk of the spliuing of people's egos, what they arc thinking of is this division {in the sphere of ego between the critical agency and the rest of the ego, and. not the a.nttthcSJS discovered by psychoanalysis between the ego and what IS and repressed. It is true that the distinction between these two anttthcs.cs ts to some extent effaced by the circumstance that foremost among the thmgs chat ar<.' rejected by the criticism of the ego arc derivatives ?f repressed.- had already discussed this critical agency at length m has paper on na.rctsstsm (1914c), P.F.L.. 11, 89-92, and it was soon to be further expanded the 'ego ideal' and 'super-ego' in, respectively, Group Psyclrolo,gy ( l921C), Ibtd., 12, 161-6, and Tire Ego a11d tire Jd (1923b), ibid., II, 367-?9·1

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But it is not only this latter material, offensive as it is to the criticism of the ego, which may be incorporated in the idea of a double. There are also all the unfulfilled but possible futures to which we still like to cling in phantasy, all the 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. 1 [Cf. Freud, 1901b, P.F.L., 5, JI6.)

But after having thus considered the manifest motivation of the figure of a 'double', we have to admit that none of this helps us to understand the extraordinarily strong feeling of something uncanny that pervades the conception; and our knowledge of mental processes enables us to add that nothing in this more superficial material could account for the urge towards defence which has caused the ego to project that material outward as something foreign to itself. When all is said and done, the quality of uncanniness can only come from the fact of the 'double' being a creation dating back to a very early mental stage, long since surmounted- a stage, incident- ally, at which it wore a more friendly aspect. The 'double' has become a thing of terror, just as, after the collapse of their religion, the gods turned into demons. (Heine, 'Die Gotter im Exil'.)

The other forms of ego disturbance exploited by Hoffmann can easily be estimated along the same lines as the theme of the 'double'. They are a harking-back to particular phases in the evolution of the self-regarding feeling, a regression to a time when the ego had not yet marked itself off sharply from the external world and from other people. I believe that these factors are partly responsible for the impression of uncanniness, although it is not easy to isolate and determine exactly their share of it.

The factor of the repetition of the same thing will perhaps

1 . In Ewen's Der Student von Prag. which serves as the starting-point of Rank's study on the 'double', the hero has promised his beloved not to kill his antagonist in a duel. But on his way to the duelling-ground he meets his 'double', who has already killed his rival. (Cf. Rank, 1914.)

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not appeal to everyone as a source of uncanny feeling. From what I have observed, this phenomenon docs undoubtedly, subject to certain conditions and combined with certain circum- stances, arouse an uncanny feeling, which, furthermore, recalls the sense of helplessness experienced in some dream-states. As I was walking, one hot summer afternoon, through the deserted streets of a provincial town in Italy which was unknown to me, I found myself in a quarter of whose character I could not long ren1ain 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 time without inquiring my way, I suddenly found myself back in the same street, my presence was now beginning to excite attention. I hurried away once tnore, only to arrive by another detour at the same place yet a third time. Now, however, a feeling overcame me which I can only describe as uncanny, and I was glad enough to find myselfback at the piazza I had left a short while before, without any further voyages of discovery. Other situations which have in common with my adventure an unintended recurrence of the same situation, but which differ radically from it in other respects, also result in the sa1ne feeling of helplessness and of uncanniness. So, for instance, when, caught in a mist perhaps, one has lost one's way in a mountain forest, every attempt to find the marked or familiar path may bring one back again and again to one and the same spot, which one can identify by some particular landn1ark. Or one may wander about in a dark, strange room, looking for the door or the electric switch, and collide time after time with the same piece of furniture - though it is true that Mark Twain succeeded by wild exaggeration in turning this latter situation .into something irresistibly comic. 1

If we take another class of things. it is easy to see that there, too, it is only this factor of involuntary repetition which sur- rounds what would otherwise be innocent enough with an un- canny atmosphere, and forces upon us the idea of something

1. [Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad, London, 1880, I, 107.)

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fateful and inescapable when otherwise we should have. spoken only of 'chance'. For instance, we naturally attach no Import- ance to the event when we hand in an overcoat and get a cloak- room ticket with the number, let us say, 62; or when we find that our cabin on a ship bears that number. But the itnpression is altered if two such events, each in itself indifferent, happen close together- if we con1e across the number 62 in a single day, or if we begin to notice that every dung. has a number - addresses, hotel rooms, contpartments m rad- way trains - invariably has the same one, or at all events one which contains the satne figures. We do feel this to be uncanny. And unless a n1an 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; he wtll take it, perhaps, as an indication of the span of life allotted to him.

1

Or suppose one is engaged in reading the works of the famous physiologist, Hering, 2 and the space a few days receives two letters from two different countrtes, each from a person called Hering, though one has never had _any dealings with anyone of that name. Not long ago an scientist (Kammerer, 1919) attempted to reduce comctdences of this kind to certain laws, and so deprive them of their un- canny effect. I will not venture to decide whether he has succeeded or not.

How exactly we can trace back to infantile psychology the uncanny effect of such similar recurrences is a question I can only lightly touch on in these pages; and I refer. the instead to another work,3 already completed, m wh1ch thts has been gone into in detail, but in a different connecti?n. it is possible to recognize the dominance in the nund of a 'compulsion to repeat' proceeding from the impulses and probably inherent in the very nature of the m- stincts- a compulsion powerful enough to overrule the pleasure

1. [Freud had himself reached the age of sixty-two a year earlier, in 1918.) 2. [Ewald Hering (1834-1918); cf. P.F.L., II, 211-12, 322.] J. [This was the Pleasure Pri11ciple (1920,g), ibid., II, 283-6, 288-94,

where the 'compulsion to repeat' is enlarged upon.]

II. THE 'UNCANNY'

principle, lending to certain aspects of the mind their daemonic character, and still very clearly expressed in the impulses of small children; a compulsion, too, which is responsible for a part of the course taken by the analyses of neurotic patients. All these con- siderations prepare us for the discovery that whatever reminds us of this inner 'compulsion to repeat' is perceived as uncanny.

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

In the story of 'Tht• Ring of Polycratcs', 1 the King of Egypt turns away in horror from his host, Polycratcs, because he sees that his friend's every wish is at once fulfilled, his every care promptly removed by kindly fate. His host has become 'un- canny' to him. His own explanation, that the too fortunate tnan has to fear the envy of the gods, seems obscure to us; its meaning is veiled in mythological language. We will there- fore turn to another example in a less grandiose setting. In the case history of an obsessional neurotic, 2 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 a very accommodating 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 gentletnan, where- upon he gave vent to his annoyance in the words: 'I wish he rna y be struck dead for it.' A fortnight later the old gentleman really did have a stroke. My patient thought this an 'uncanny' experience. The impression of uncanniness would have been stronger stil1 if less time had elapsed between his words and the untoward event, or if he had been able to report innumerable similar coincidences. As a matter of fact, he had

!.{Schiller's poem based on Herodotus.] 2. 'Notes upon a Case ofObscssional Neurosis' (I9Q<Jd) (P.F.L., 9. 113-14).

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no difficulty in producing coincidences of this sort; but then not only he but every obsessional neurotic I have observed has been able to relate analogous experiences. They are never surprised at their invariably running up against someone they have just been thinking of, perhaps for the first time for a long while. Ifthey say one day 'I haven't had any 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 passed through their mind a little while before. They are in the habit of referring to this state of affairs in the ntost modest manner, saying that they have 'presenti- ments' which 'usually' come true.

One of the most uncanny and widespread forms of super- stition is the dread of the evil eye, which has been exhaustively studied by the Hamburg oculist Seligmann (1910-I 1). There never seems to have been any doubt about the source of this dread. Whoever possesses something that is at once valuable and fragile is afraid of other people's envy, in so far as he pro- jects on to then1 the envy he would have felt in their place. A feeling like this betrays itself by a look 1 even though it is not put into words; and when a man is prominent owing to noticeable, and particularly owing to unattractive, attributes, other people arc ready to believe that his envy is rising to a more than usual degree of intensity and that this intensity will convert it into effective action. What is feared is thus a secret intention of doing harm, and certain signs are taken to mean that that intention has the necessary power at its cotnmand.

These last examples of the uncanny are to be referred to the principle which I have called 'omnipotence of thoughts', taking the name from an expression used by one of my patients. 2 And now we find ourselves on familiar ground. Our analysis of instances of the uncanny has led us back to the old, anin1istic conception of the universe. This was characterized by the idea that the world was peopled with the spirits ofhuman

1. ['The evil eye' in German is 'der bose Blick', literally 'the cvillook'.J 2. [The obsessional patient referred to just above - the 'Rat Man' ( 1 909d),

P.F.L., 9, 113-14 and n. 2.)

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beings; by the subject's narcissistic overvaluation of his own mental processes; by the belief in the omnipotence of thoughts and the technique of magic based on that belief; by the attribution to various outside persons and things of carefully graded magical powers, or 'matJa'; as well as by all the other creations with the help of which man, in the unrestricted narcissism of that stage of development, strove to fend off the manifest prohibitions of reality. It seems as if each one of us has been through a phase of individual development corres- ponding to this animistic stage in primitive men, that none of us has passed through it without preserving certain residues and traces of it which are still capable of manifesting themselves, and that everything which now strikes us as 'uncanny' fulfils the condition of touching those residues of animistic mental activity within us and bringing them to expression. 1

At this point I will 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 affect belonging to an emotional impulse, whatever its kind, is transformed, if it is repressed, into anxiety, then among instances of frightening things there must be one class in which the frightening element can be shown to be something repressed which recurs. This class of frightening things would then con- stitute the uncanny; and it must be a matter of indifference whether what is uncanny was itself originally frightening or whether it carried some other affect. In the second place, if this is indeed the secret nature of the uncanny, we can understand why linguistic usage has extended das Heimliche ['homely'] into its opposite, das Unheimliche; for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old- established in the mind and which has become alienated from

1. Cf. my book Totem arrd Taboo (1912-IJ), Essay Ill, 'Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thoughts', where the following footnote wilJ be found: 'We appear to artributc an "uncanny" quality to itpprcssions that seek to confirm the omnipotence of thoughts and the animistic mode of thinking in general, after we have a stage at which, in our judgement, we have abandoned such beliefs.' [P.F.L .• 13, 144 n. 1.]

THE 'UNCANNY'

it only through the process of repression. This reference to the factor of repression enables us, furthermore, to understand Schelling's definition [p. 345] of the uncanny as something which ought to have remained hidden but has 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 retun1 of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts. As we have seen, some languages in use to-day can only render the German expression 'an Jm- heimlich house' by 'a haunted house'. We might indeed have begun our investigation with this exaxnple, perhaps the n1ost striking of all, of something uncanny, but we refrained from doing so because the uncanny in it is too much intermixed with what is purely gruesome and is in part overlaid by it. 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 com- pletely preserved under a thin disguise, as our relation to death. Two things account for our conservatism: the strength of our original emotional reaction to death 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. 1 It is true that the statement 'All men are mortal' is paraded in text-books of logic as an example of a general proposition; but no human being really grasps it, and our un- conscious has as little use now as it ever had for the idea of its own mortality. 2 Religions contii1ue to dispute the im- portance of the undeniable fact of individual death and to postulate a life after death; civil governments still believe that they cannot maintain moral order among the living if they

1 •. [This problem figures prominently in Beyond tire Pleasure Hriuciplc (I9log), on which Freud was engaged while writing the present paper. (Cf. P.F.L., II, 316 ff.)] . {Freud had discussed the individual's attitude to death at greater length In Thoughts for the Times on War and Death. ( 19 I sb), ibid., U, 62., 79-89.]

II. THE 'UNCANNY'

do not uphold the prospect of a better life hereafter as a recompense for mundane existence. In our great cities, placards announce lectures that undertake to tell us how to get into touch with the souls of the departed; and it cannot be denied that not a few of the most able and penetrating minds among our men of science have come to the conclusion, especially towards the close of their own lives, that a contact of this kind is not impossible. Since almost 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 cotnc to the surface on any provocation. Most likely our fear still implies the old belief that the dead man becomes the enen1y of his survivor and seeks 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, which is the necessary condition of a primitive feeling recurring in the shape of something uncanny. But repression is there, too. All supposedly educated people ceased to believe officially that the dead can become v1s1ble as spirits, and have made any such on improbable and remote conditions; thetr emottonal attttude towards their dead, moreover, once a highly ambiguous and ambivalent one, has been toned down in the higher strata of the rnind into an unambiguous feeling of piety. 1

We have now only a few remarks to add- for animism, magic and sorcery, the on1nipotence of thoughts, n:an 's attitude to death, involuntary repetition and the castration comprise practically all the factors which turn somethmg frightening into something uncanny.

We can also speak of a living person as uncanny, an.d we do so when we ascribe evil intentions to him. But that ts not all· in addition to this we must feel that his intentions to harm us 'are going to be carried out with the help of special powers. A good instance of this is the 'Gettatore' ,2 that uncanny figure

1. Cf. Totem aud Tal"'o l (1912-IJ). l'.F.L.. IJ, 122.) 2. 1 Literally 'thrower' (of bad luck), or 'one who casts' (the cvi] eye). -

Schaeffer's novc1 was published in 1918.)