A Summary on Sigmund Freud's essay "The Uncanny" (1919) (1)

I

Freud starts the essay with investigation of the definitions of the concept 'The Uncanny', with the only previous studies ever done on this subject by the German psychologist, Ernst Jentsh, as the starting point for his own examination. Although the sense of 'uncanny' was never an easy state to identify, Jentsh concluded that it belongs to the area of the frightening which relates to the novel and the unfamiliar. Freud, with some objections to Jentsh's analysis, took it further beyond where Jentsh ended, at first by looking at how German language defines 'unheimlich' ('unhomely', 'uncanny'). Among many different resources Freud referred to there were two points that particularly interested him ;

"... among the various shades of meaning that are recorded for the word heimlich there is one in which it merges with its formal antonym, unheimlich, so that what is called heimlich becomes unheimlich. (the passage is by Gutzkow.) ...this remind us that this word heimlich is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which are not mutually contradictory, but very different from each other - the one relating to what is familiar and comfortable, the other to what is concealed and kept hidden."

"...our attention is seized by Schelling's remark, which says, something quite new - something we certainly did not expect - about the meaning of unhemilich, namely, that the term 'uncanny' (unheimlich) applies to everything that was intended to remain secret, hidden away, and has come into the open."