THE UNCANNY The Freudian uncanny

… from FREUD Superego internalized behaviours or values (conscience/socialization) Ego Our sense of self … usually deluded or incomplete (see Johari window) Id instinct, desire, gratification, impulse

INSTINCTS Fear Pleasure Aggression Eros (life-force incl. eroticism) Thanatos (death wish)

FREUD

For FREUD Taboo: what is forbidden by the superego Repression: denial of / resistance to taboo, which leads inevitably to anxiety/unhappiness Sublimation – encounters with the re-constituted desire for repressed taboos-- temporarily relieves anxiety The uncanny recurring encounters with sublimated desires that are projections of taboo or of a conflicted (desire for-repulsion of) a taboo

* arouses fear dread horror * creates intellectual uncertainty THE UNCANNY * arouses fear dread horror * creates intellectual uncertainty

THE UNCANNY “leads back to what is known o of old and long familiar” (can be like a déjà vu) and yet is “novel and unfamiliar”

THE UNCANNY Is associated with being disorientated in one’s environment Related to German heimlich (“belonging to the house, familiar, not strange) and unheimlich

THE UNCANNY Corollary 1 Affective emotional responses when repressed, transform into anxiety and therefore also into the involuntary repetition of the encounter

THE UNCANNY Corollary 2 “The uncanny is nothing new or alien … merely something which is familiar … and which has become alienated from [the mind] … only through the process of repression.”

THE UNCANNY Death, dead bodies and revenants (those who return from the dead) represent fears that we have repressed in an educated society (13)

THE UNCANNY … educated people have ceased to believe that the dead can become visible as spirits … their emotional attitude towards their dead … has been toned down [ie repressed] in the higher strata of the mind into an unambiguous feeling of piety. (13)

THE UNCANNY “neurotic men declare they feel there is something uncanny about the female genital organs …. [an infantalized unheimlich place] As whacked as this seems, be vigilant for this theme in some ghost stories.