The uncanny is the psychological experience of an event or individual as not simply mysterious, but frightening in a way that feels oddly familiar. This phenomenon is used to describe incidents where a familiar thing or event is encountered in an unsettling, eerie, or taboo context.
Ernst Jentsch set out the concept of the uncanny, later elaborated on by Sigmund Freud in his 1919 essay "Das Unheimliche", which explores the eeriness of dolls and waxworks. For Freud, the uncanny is located in the strangeness of the ordinary. Expanding on the idea, psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan wrote that the uncanny places us "in the field where we do not know how to distinguish bad and good, pleasure from displeasure", resulting in an irreducible anxiety that gestures to the Real. The concept has since been taken up by a variety of thinkers and theorists such as roboticist Masahiro Mori's uncanny valley and Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection.
History
German idealism
Philosopher F. W. J. Schelling raised the question of the uncanny in his late Philosophie der Mythologie of 1837, postulating that the Homeric clarity was built upon a prior repression of the uncanny.
In The Will to Power manuscript, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche refers to nihilism as "the uncanniest of all guests" and, earlier, in On the Genealogy of Morals he argues it is the "will to truth" that has destroyed the metaphysics that underpins the values of Western culture. Hence, he coins the phrase "European nihilism" to describe the condition that afflicts those Enlightenment ideals that seemingly hold strong values yet undermine themselves.
Ernst Jentsch
Uncanniness was first explored psychologically by Ernst Jentsch in a 1906 essay, On the Psychology of the Uncanny. Jentsch defines the Uncanny as: being a product of "...intellectual uncertainty; so that the uncanny would always, as it were, be something one does not know one’s way about in. The better oriented in his environment a person is, the less readily will he get the impression of something uncanny in regard to the objects and events in it." He expands upon its use in fiction:
Jentsch identifies German writer E. T. A. Hoffmann as a writer who uses uncanny effects in his work, focusing specifically on Hoffmann's story "The Sandman" ("Der Sandmann"), which features a lifelike doll, Olympia.
Sigmund Freud
The concept of the Uncanny was later elaborated on and developed by Sigmund Freud in his 1919 essay "Das Unheimliche" or, "The Uncanny", which also draws on the work of Hoffmann (whom Freud refers to as the "unrivaled master of the uncanny in literature"). However, he criticizes Jentsch's belief that Olympia is the central uncanny element in the story ("The Sandman"):
Instead, Freud draws on a wholly different element of the story, namely, "the idea of being robbed of one's eyes", as the "more striking instance of uncanniness" in the tale. He focuses on the eyes and their similarity to male castration anxiety in the remainder of his essay and how this anxiety can lead to a male audience feeling the uncanny due to the idea of them being robbed of their masculinity which is illustrated by Freud as a central contributor to male fear.
Freud goes on, for the remainder of the essay, to identify uncanny effects that result from instances of "repetition of the same thing," linking the concept to that of the repetition compulsion. He includes incidents wherein one becomes lost and accidentally retraces one's steps, and instances wherein random numbers recur, seemingly meaningfully (here Freud may be said to be prefiguring the concept that Jung would later refer to as synchronicity). He also discusses the uncanny nature of Otto Rank's concept of the "double".