A Summary on Sigmund Freud's essay "The Uncanny" (1919) (2)

II

In the second chapter of the essay, he moves on to the investigation of 'the uncanny' in persons, things, impressions, processes and situations. He begins with a reference to one of E.T.A. Hoffmann's story 'The Sand-Man', in which the Sand-Man tears out children's eyes, and he later relates the fear of losing eyes to that of castration. This lead him to search for the connections which the motifs that produce the 'uncanny' effect have with infantile sources.
He follows ;

"They (those motifs) involve the idea of the 'double', in all its nuances and manifestations - that is to say, the appearance of persons who have to be regarded as identical because they look alike. This relationship is intensified by the spontaneous transmission of mental processes from one of these persons to the other...a person may intensify himself with another and so become unsure of his true self ; or he may substitute the other's self for his own. The self may thus be duplicated, divided and interchanged."
(here he leaves the further exploration on the concept of 'double' to a study by O.Rank.)

Next, Freud brings up the examples, through his own or others' experiences, of the situations, in recurrences of the same thing, that evokes 'the uncanny';

• unintended returns to same place,

• encounters with same number over and over in a day,

• receiving the letters from two people with same name although one had no previous dealings with anyone of that name.

He relates those to 'a compulsion to repeat' (which "proceeds from instinctual impulses and clearly is manifest in the impulses of small children and dominates part of the course taken by the psychoanalysis of victims of neurosis.") and suggest, as a fact that,

"anything that can remind us of this inner compulsion to repeat is perceived as uncanny."

He continues the collection of examples ;

• fear of 'evil eyes', which is defined by "anyone who possesses something precious, but fragile, is afraid of the envy of others, to the extent that he projects the envy he would have felt in their place." He relates this to a term 'the omnipotence of thoughts', in which he explains in depth in the following paragraph.

• (to many people) anything to do with death; dead bodies, revenants, spirits and ghosts. He briefly touches upon the periphrasis 'a haunted house', however, he wishes not to begin an investigation on this here.

• a living person, the effects of madness or epilepsy, when one sees "a manifestation of forces that he did not suspect in a fellow human being, but whose stirrings he can dimly perceive in remote corners of his own personality."

He presents his two observations, in connection to 'repression', in this study of 'uncanny';

1. "...if psychoanalytic theory is right in asserting that every affect arising from an emotional impulse -of whatever kind- is converted into fear by being repressed, it follows that among those things that are felt to be frightening there must be one group in which it can be shown that the frightening element is something that has been repressed and now returns. This species of the frightening would then constitute 'the uncanny'."
2. "...we can understand why German usage allows the familiar 'heimliche' to switch to its opposite, the uncanny 'unheimliche', for this uncanny element is actually nothing new or strange, but something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only thorough being repressed."