Course Description:
In his classic essay “The Uncanny” (1919), Sigmund Freud theorized the psychological implications of those aesthetic effects which disturb us, unsettle us, and creep us out without us quite knowing why. While the
uncanny or das unheimliche evokes a peculiar form of affect within “the field of the frightening” (123), it is a type of fear quite distinct from (though not entirely unrelated to) that produced by horror and terror. The uncanny, Freud observes, “goes back to what was once known and had long been familiar” (124). In this sense, the uncanny marks a traumatic return of the
repressed. While the fear caused by an external threat corresponds specifically to the biological organism, the uncanny relates, more particularly, to what the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan refers to as the “divided” subject, namely the subject of language and of the unconscious. The uncanny generates anxiety in the subject not because it threatens its biological existence, but rather, because it stages a “missed” encounter with what Lacan calls the ex-timate, “something strange to me, although it is at the heart of me” (VII 71).