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The “Uncanny” (1919)

SIGMUND FREUD

I

It is only rarely that a psychoanalyst feels impelled to investigate the subject of aesthetics even when aesthetics is understood to mean not merely the theory of beauty, but the theory of the qualities of feeling. He works in other planes of mental life and has little to do with those subdued emotional activities which, inhibited in their aims and dependent upon a multitude of concurrent factors, usually furnish the material for the study of aesthetics. But it does occasionally happen that he has to interest himself in some particular province of that subject; and then it usually proves to be a rather remote region of it and one that has been neglected in standard works.

The subject of the “uncanny” is a province of this kind. It undoubtedly belongs to all that is terrible—to all that arouses dread and creeping horror; it is equally certain, too, that the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with whatever excites dread. Yet we may expect that it implies some intrinsic quality which justifies the use of a special name. One is curious to know what this peculiar quality is which allows us to distinguish as “uncanny” certain things within the boundaries of what is “fearful.”

As good as nothing is to be found upon this subject in elaborate treatises on aesthetics, which in general prefer to concern themselves with what is beautiful, attractive and sublime, that is with feelings of a positive nature, with the circumstances and the objects that call them forth, rather than with the opposite feelings of unpleasantness and repulsion. I know of only one attempt in medico-psychological literature, a fertile but not exhaustive paper by E. Jentsch.2 But I must confess that I have not made a very thorough examination of the bibliography, especially the foreign literature, relating to this present modest contribution of mine, for reasons which must be obvious at this time;3 so that my paper is presented to the reader without any claim of priority.

In his study of the “uncanny,” Jentsch quite rightly lays stress on the obstacle presented by the fact that people vary so very greatly in their sensitivity to this quality of feeling. The writer of the present contribution, indeed, must himself plead guilty to a special obtuseness in the matter, where extreme delicacy of perception would be more in place. It is long since he has experienced or heard of anything which has given him an uncanny impression, and he will be obliged to translate himself into that state of feeling, and to awaken in himself the possibility of it before he begins. Still, difficulties of this kind make themselves felt powerfully in many other branches of aesthetics; we need not on this account despair of finding instances in which the quality in question will be recognized without hesitation by most people.

Two courses are open to us at the start. Either we can find out what meaning has come to be attached to the word “uncanny” in the course of its history; or we can collect all those properties of persons, things, sensations, experiences and situations which arouse in us the feeling of uncanniness, and then infer the unknown nature of the uncanny from what they all have in common. I will say at once that both courses lead to the same result: the “uncanny” is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.

Footnotes

¹ First published in Imago, Bd. V., 1919; reprinted in Sammlung, Fünfte Folge. [Translated by Alix Strachey.]

¹ Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen.
² [An allusion to the European War only just concluded. — Trans.]

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How this is possible, in what circumstances the familiar can become uncanny and frightening, I shall show in what follows. Let me also add that my investigation was actually begun by collecting a number of individual cases, and only later received confirmation after I had examined what language could tell us. In this discussion, however, I shall follow the opposite course.

• The German word unheimlich ^ 4 is obviously the opposite of heimlich, heimisch, meaning “familiar,” “native,” “belonging to the home”; and we are tempted to conclude that what is “uncanny” is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar.

Naturally not everything which is new and unfamiliar is frightening, however; the relation cannot be inverted. We can only say that what is novel can easily become frightening and uncanny; some new things are frightening but not by any means all. Something has to be added to what is novel and unfamiliar to make it uncanny.

On the whole, Jentsch did not get beyond this relation of the uncanny to the novel and unfamiliar. He ascribes the essential factor in the production of the feeling of uncanniness to intellectual uncertainty; so that the uncanny would always be that in which one does not know where one is, as it were. The better orientated 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.

It is not difficult to see that this definition is incomplete, and we will therefore try to proceed beyond the equation of unheimlich with unfamiliar. We will first turn to other languages. But foreign dictionaries tell us nothing new, perhaps only because we speak a different language. Indeed, we get the impression that many languages are without a word for this particular variety of what is fearful. ^ 4

Etymological and Cultural Connections of "Uncanny"

I wish to express my indebtedness to Dr. Th. Reik for the following excerpts:

LATIN: (K. E. Gorges, Deutschlateinisches Wörterbuch, 1898). Ein unheimlicher Ort [an uncanny place]—locus suspectus; in unheimlicher Nachtzeit [in the dismal night hours]—intempesta nocte.

GREEK: (Rost’s and Schenki’s Lexikons). Xenos strange, foreign.

ENGLISH: (from dictionaries by Lucas, Bellow, Flügel, Muret-Sanders). Uncomfortable, uneasy, gloomy, dismal, uncanny, ghastly; (of a house) haunted; (of a man) a repulsive fellow.

FRENCH: (Sachs-Villatte). Inquiétant, sinistre, lugubre, mal à son aise.

SPANISH: (Tollhausen, 1889). Sospechoso, de mal aguëro, lugubre, siniestro.

The Italian and the Portuguese seem to content themselves with words which we should describe as circumlocutions. In Arabic and Hebrew, “uncanny” means the same as “daemonic,” “gruesome.” This suggests a shared cross-cultural understanding that associates the uncanny not just with simple strangeness, but with supernatural, malevolent, or frightening qualities.

Let us therefore return to the German language. In Daniel Sanders’ Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (1860), the following remarks ^ i [abstracted in translation] are found upon the word heimlich; I have laid stress on certain passages by italicizing them.

Heimlich, adj.: I. Also heimlich, heinielig, belonging to the house, not strange, familiar, tame, intimate, comfortable, homely, etc.

(a) (Obsolete) belonging to the house or the family, or regarded as so belonging (cf. Latin familiaris): Die Heimlichen, the members of the household; Der heimliche Rat [him to whom secrets are revealed] Gen. xli. 45; 2 Sam. xxiii. 23; now more usually Geheimer Rat [Privy Councilor], cf. Heimlicher.

(b) Of animals: tame, companionable to man. As opposed to wild, e.g. “Wild animals . . . that are trained to be heimlich and accustomed to men.”

Footnotes

4 Throughout this paper “uncanny” is used as the English translation of “unheimlich,” literally “unhomely” —Trans.

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heimlich and accustomed to men.” “If these young creatures are brought up from early days among men they become quite heimlich, friendly,” etc.

(c) Friendly, intimate, homelike; the enjoyment of quiet content, etc., arousing a sense of peaceful pleasure and security as in one within the four walls of his house. “Is it still heimlich to you in your country where strangers are felling your woods?” “She did not feel all too heimlich with him.” “To destroy the Heimlichkeit of the home.” “I could not readily find another spot so intimate and heimlich as this.” “In quiet Heinzlichkeit, surrounded by close walls.” “A careful housewife, who knows how to make a pleasing Heimlichkeit (Häuslichkeit)${}^5$ out of the smallest means.” “The protestant rulers do not feel . . . heimlich among their catholic subjects.” “When it grows heimlich and still, and the evening quiet alone watches over your cell.” “Quiet, lovely and heimlich, no place more fitted for her rest.” “The in and out flowing waves of the currents dreamy and heimlich as a cradle-song.” Cf. in especial Unheimlich. Among Swabian and Swiss authors in especial, often as trisyllable: “How heimlich it seemed again of an evening, back at home.” “The warm room and the heimelig afternoon.” “Little by little they grew at ease and heimelig among themselves.” “That which comes from afar . . . assuredly does not live quite heimelig (heimatlich [at home], freundnachbarlich [in a neighborly way]) among the people.” “The sentinel’s horn sounds so heimelig from the tower, and his voice invites so hospitably.” This form of the word ought to become general in order to protect the word from becoming obsolete in its good sense through an easy confusion with II. [see below]. ““The Zecks [a family name] are all heimlich.” ” “Heimlich”? What do you understand by “heimlich”? ’Well, . . . they are like a buried spring or a dried-up pond. One cannot

Footnotes

${}^5$ [From Haus = house; Häuslichkeit = domestic life. —Trans.]

walk over it without always having the feeling that water might come up there again.’ ‘Oh, we call it “unheimlich”; you call it “heimlich.” Well, what makes you think that there is something secret and untrustworthy about this family?’” Gutzkow.

II. Concealed, kept from sight, so that others do not get to know about it, withheld from others, cf. Geheim [secret]; so also Heimlichkeit for Geheimnis [secret]. To do something heimlich, i.e. behind someone’s back; to steal away heimlich; heimlich meetings and appointments; to look on with heimlich pleasure at someone’s discomfiture; to sigh or weep heimlich; to behave heimlich, as though there was something to conceal; heimlich love, love-affair, sin; heimlich places (which good manners oblige us to conceal). 1 Sam, v. 6; “The heimlich chamber” [privy]. 2 Kings x. 27 etc.; ”To throw into pits or Heimlichkeit.” Led the steeds heimlich before Laomedon. “As secretive, heimlich, deceitful and malicious towards cruel masters . . . as frank, open, sympathetic and helpful towards a friend in misfortune.” “The heimlich art” (magic). “Where public ventilation has to stop, there heimlich machinations begin.” “Freedom is the whispered watchword of heimlich conspirators and the loud battle-cry of professed revolutionaries.” “A holy, heimlich effect.” “I have roots that are most heimlich, I am grown in the deep earth.” “My heimlich pranks.” (Cf. Heimtücke [mischief]). To discover, disclose, betray someone’s Heimlichkeiten; “to concoct Heimlichkeiten behind my back.” Cf. Geheimnis.

Compounds and especially also the opposite follow meaning I. (above): Unheimlich, uneasy, eerie, bloodcurdling; “Seeming almost unheimlich and ‘ghostly’ to him.” “I had already long since felt an unheimlich, even gruesome feeling.” “Feels an unheimlich horror.” “Unheimlich and motionless like a stone-image.” “The unheimlich mist called hill-fog.” “These pale youths are unheimlich and are brewing heaven knows what mischief.” “Unheimlich” is

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the name for everything that ought to have remained . . . hidden and secret and has become visible,” Schelling. “To veil the divine, to surround it with a certain Unheimlichkeit.”—Unheimlich is not often used as opposite to meaning II. (above).

What interests us most in this long extract is to find that among its different shades of meaning the word heimlich exhibits one which is identical with its opposite, unheimlich. What is heimlich thus comes to be unheimlich. (Cf. the quotation from Gutzkow: “We call it unheimlich; you call it heimlich.”) In general we are reminded that the word heimlich is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which without being contradictory are yet very different: on the one hand, it means that which is familiar and congenial, and on the other, that which is concealed and kept out of sight. The word unheimlich is only used customarily, we are told, as the contrary of the first signification, and not of the second. Sanders tells us nothing concerning a possible genetic connection between these two sorts of meanings. On the other hand, we notice that Schelling says something which throws quite a new light on the concept of the “uncanny,” one which we had certainly not awaited. According to him everything is uncanny that ought to have remained hidden and secret, and yet comes to light.

Some of the doubts that have thus arisen are removed if we consult Grimm’s dictionary. ^ ii

We read:

Heimlich; adj. and adv. vernaculus, occultus; MHG. heîmelich, heîmlich.
P. 874. In a slightly different sense: “I feel heimlich, well, free from fear. . . .
(b) Heimlich, also in the sense of a place free from ghostly influences . . . familiar, friendly, intimate.

4 ) From the idea of “homelike,” “belonging to the house,” the further idea is developed of something withdrawn from the eyes

of others, something concealed, secret, and this idea is expanded in many ways. . .

P. 876. "On the left bank of the lake there lies a meadow heimlich in the wood.” Schiller, Tell. . . . Poetic licence, rarely so used in modern speech . . . In conjunction with a verb expressing the act of concealing: "In the secret of his tabernacle he shall hide me (heimlich).” Ps. xxvii. 5 . . . Heimlich places in the human body, pudenda. . . "the men that died not were smitten" (on their heimlich parts). 1 Samuel v. 12.

(c) Officials who give important advice which has to be kept secret in matters of state are called heimlich councillors; the adjective, according to modern usage, having been replaced by geheim [secret] . . . "Pharaoh called Joseph's name 'him to whom secrets are revealed‘“ (heimlich councillor). Gen. xli. 45.

P. 878. 6. Heimlich, as used of knowledge, mystic, allegorical: a heimlich meaning, mysticus, divinus, occultus, figuratus.

P. 878. Heimlich in a different sense, as withdrawn from knowledge, unconscious: . . . Heimlich also has the meaning of that which is obscure, inaccessible to knowledge. . . "Do you not see? They do not trust me; they fear the heimlich face of the Duke of Friedland." Wallensteins Lager, Act. 2.

9 ) The notion of something hidden and dangerous, which is expressed in the last paragraph, is still further developed, so that ”heimlich” comes to have the meaning usually ascribed to “unheimlich.” Thus: “At times I feel like a man who walks in the night and believes in ghosts; every corner is heimlich and full of terrors for him.” Klinger.

Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops towards an ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of heimlich. Let us retain this discovery, which we do not yet properly understand, alongside of Schelling’s definition of the "uncanny." Then if we examine individual instances of uncanniness, these indications will become comprehensible to us.

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II

In proceeding to review those things, persons, impressions, events and situations which are able to arouse in us a feeling of the uncanny in a very forcible and definite form, the first requirement is obviously to select a suitable example to start upon. Jentsch has taken as a very good instance “doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate”; and he refers in this connection to the impression made by wax-work figures, artificial dolls and automatons. He adds to this class the uncanny effect of epileptic seizures and the manifestations of insanity, because these excite in the spectator the feeling that automatic, mechanical processes are at work, concealed beneath the ordinary appearance of animation. Without entirely accepting the author’s view, we will take it as a starting-point for our investigation because it leads us on to consider a writer who has succeeded better than anyone else in producing uncanny effects.

The Role of Narrative Uncertainty

Jentsch says: “In telling a story, one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton; and to do it in such a way that his attention is not directly focused upon his uncertainty, so that he may not be urged to go into the matter and clear it up immediately, since that, as we have said, would quickly dissipate the peculiar emotional effect of the thing.” Hoffmann has repeatedly employed this psychological artifice with success in his fantastic narratives.

This observation, undoubtedly a correct one, refers primarily to the story of “The Sand-Man” in Hoffmann’s Nachtstücken, which contains the original of Olympia, the doll in the first act of Offenbach’s opera, Tales of Hoffmann.

^6 [From Haus = house; Häuslichkeit = domestic life. —Trans.]

Hoffmann. But I cannot think—and I hope that most readers of the story will agree with me—that the theme of the doll, Olympia, who is to all appearances a living being, is by any means the only element to be held responsible for the quite unparalleled atmosphere of uncanniness which the story evokes; or, indeed, that it is the most important among them. Nor is this effect of the story heightened by the fact that the author himself treats the episode of Olympia with a faint touch of satire and uses it to make fun of the young man’s idealization of his mistress. The main theme of the story is, on the contrary, something different, something which gives its name to the story, and which is always re-introduced at the critical moment: it is the theme of the “Sand-Man” who tears out children’s eyes.

This fantastic tale begins with the childhood recollections of the student Nathaniel: in spite of his present happiness, he cannot banish the memories associated with the mysterious and terrifying death of the father he loved. On certain evenings his mother used to send the children to bed early, warning them that “the Sand-Man was coming”; and sure enough Nathaniel would not fail to hear the heavy tread of a visitor with whom his father would then be occupied that evening. When questioned about the Sand-Man, his mother, it is true, denied that such a person existed except as a form of speech; but his nurse could give him more definite information: “He is a wicked man who comes when children won’t go to bed, and throws handfuls of sand in their eyes so that they jump out of their heads all bleeding. Then he puts the eyes in a sack and carries them off to the moon to feed his children. They sit up there in their nest, and their beaks are hooked like owls’ beaks, and they use them to peck up naughty boys’ and girls’ eyes with.”

Although little Nathaniel was sensible and old enough not to believe in such gruesome attributes to the figure of the Sand-Man, yet the dread of him became fixed in his…

5

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breast. He determined to find out what the Sand-Man looked like; and one evening, when the Sand-Man was again expected, he hid himself in his father’s study. He recognized the visitor as the lawyer Coppelius, a repulsive person of whom the children were frightened when he occasionally came to a meal; and he now identified this Coppelius with the dreaded Sand-Man. Concerning the rest of the scene, Hoffmann already leaves us in doubt whether we are witnessing the first delirium of the panic-stricken boy, or a succession of events which are to be regarded in the story as being real. His father and the guest begin to busy themselves at a hearth with glowing flames. The little eavesdropper hears Coppelius call out, “Here with your eyes!” and betrays himself by screaming aloud; Coppelius seizes him and is about to drop grains of red-hot coal out of the fire into his eyes, so as to cast them out on the hearth. His father begs him off and saves his eyes. After this the boy falls into a deep swoon; and a long illness followed upon his experience. Those who lean towards a rationalistic interpretation of the Sand-Man will not fail to recognize in the child’s phantasy the continued influence of his nurse’s story. The grains of sand that are to be thrown into the child’s eyes turn into red-hot grains of coal out of the flames; and in both cases they are meant to make his eyes jump out. In the course of another visit of the Sand-Man’s, a year later, his father was killed in his study by an explosion. The lawyer Coppelius vanished from the place without leaving a trace behind. Nathaniel, now a student, believes that he has recognized this childhood’s phantom of horror in an itinerant optician, an Italian called Giuseppe Coppola. This man had offered him barometers for sale in his university town and when Nathaniel refused had added: “Eh, not barometers, not barometers—also got fine eyes, beautiful eyes.” The student’s terror was allayed on finding that the proffered eyes were only harmless spectacles, and he bought a pocket

telescope from Coppola. With its aid he looks across into Professor Spalanzani’s house opposite and there spies Spalanzani’s beautiful, but strangely silent and motionless daughter, Olympia. He soon falls in love with her so violently that he quite forgets his clever and sensible betrothed on her account. But Olympia was an automaton whose works Spalanzani had made, and whose eyes Coppola, the Sand-Man, had put in. The student surprises the two men quarrelling over their handiwork. The optician carries off the wooden eyeless doll; and the mechanician, Spalanzani, takes up Olympia’s bleeding eye-balls from the ground and throws them at Nathaniel’s breast, saying that Coppola had stolen them from him (Nathaniel). Nathaniel succumbs to a fresh attack of madness, and in his delirium his recollection of his father’s death is mingled with this new experience. He cries, “Faster—faster—faster—rings of fire—rings of fire! Whirl about, rings of fire—round and round! Wooden doll, ho! lovely wooden doll, whirl about——,” then falls upon the professor, Olympia’s so-called father, and tries to strangle him.

Rallying from a long and serious illness, Nathaniel seemed at last to have recovered. He was going to marry his betrothed with whom he was reconciled. One day he was walking through the town and marketplace, where the high tower of the Town-Hall threw its huge shadow. On the girl’s suggestion they mounted the tower, leaving her brother, who was walking with them, down below. Up there, Clara’s attention is drawn to a curious object coming along the street. Nathaniel looks at this thing through Coppola’s spyglass, which he finds in his pocket, and falls into a new fit of madness. Shouting out, “Whirl about, my wooden doll!” he tries to fling the girl into the depths below. Her brother, brought to her side by her cries, rescues her and hastens down to safety with her. Up above, the raving man rushes round, shrieking “Rings of fire, whirl about!”—words whose origin we know. Among the people

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who begin to gather below there comes forward the figure of the lawyer Coppelius, suddenly returned. We may suppose it was his approach, seen through the telescope, that threw Nathaniel into his madness. People want to go up and overpower the madman, but Coppelius⁷ laughs and says, “Wait a bit; he’ll come down of himself.” Nathaniel suddenly stands still, catches sight of Coppelius, and with a wild shriek “Yes! ‘Fine eyes-beautiful eyes,’” flings himself down over the parapet. No sooner does he lie on the paving-stones with a shattered skull than the Sand-Man vanishes in the throng.

This short summary leaves, I think, no doubt that the feeling of something uncanny is directly attached to the figure of the Sand-Man, that is, to the idea of being robbed of one’s eyes; and that Jentsch’s point of an intellectual uncertainty has nothing to do with this effect. Uncertainty whether an object is living or inanimate, which we must admit in regard to the doll Olympia, is quite irrelevant in connection with this other, more striking instance of uncanniness. It is true that the writer creates a kind of uncertainty in us in the beginning by not letting us know, no doubt purposely, whether he is taking us into the real world or into a purely fantastic one of his own creation. He has admitted the right to do either; and if he chooses to stage his action in a world peopled with spirits, demons and ghosts, as Shakespeare does in Hamlet, in Macbeth and, in a different sense, in The Tempest and A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, we must bow to his decision and treat his setting as though it were real for as long as we put ourselves into his hands. But this uncertainty disappears in the course of Hoffmann’s story, and we perceive that he means to make us, too, look through the fell Coppola’s glasses—perhaps, indeed, that he himself once gazed

⁷ Frau Dr. Rank has pointed out the association of the name with “Coppella” = crucible, connecting it with the chemical operations that caused the father’s death; and also with “coppo/coppia?” = eye-socket.

through such an instrument. For the conclusion of the story makes it quite clear that Coppola the optician really is the lawyer Coppelius and thus also the Sand-Man.

There is no question, therefore, of any "intellectual uncertainty"; we know now that we are not supposed to be looking on at the products of a madman's imagination behind which we, with the superiority of rational minds, are able to detect the sober truth; and yet this knowledge does not lessen the impression of uncanniness in the least degree. The theory of "intellectual uncertainty" is thus incapable of explaining that impression.

Collective (Jungian) Fear // Castration Fear

We know from psychoanalytic experience, however, that this fear of damaging or losing one's eyes is a terrible fear of childhood. Many adults still retain their apprehensiveness in this respect, and no bodily injury is so much dreaded by them as an injury to the eye. We are accustomed to say, too, that we will treasure a thing as the apple of our eye.

A study of dreams, phantasies and myths has taught us that a morbid anxiety connected with the eyes and with going blind is often enough a substitute for the dread of castration. In blinding himself, Oedipus, that mythical law-breaker, was simply carrying out a mitigated form of the punishment of castration—the only punishment that according to the lex talionis was fitted for him.

We may try to reject the derivation of fears about the eye from the fear of castration on rationalistic grounds, and say that it is very natural that so precious an organ as the eye should be guarded by a proportionate dread; indeed, we might go further and say that the fear of castration itself contains no other significance and no deeper secret than a justifiable dread of this kind. But this view does not account adequately for the substantive relation between the eye and the male member which is seem to exist in dreams and myths and phantasies; nor can it dispel the impression one gains that it is the threat of being castrated in special which excites a peculiarly violent and obscure emotion.

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and this emotion is what first gives the idea of losing ones eyes its intense colouring. All further doubts are removed when we get the details of their "castration-complex" from the analyses of neurotic patients, and realize its immense importance in their mental life.

Moreover, I would not recommend any opponent of the psychoanalytic view to select precisely the story of the Sand-Man upon which to build his case that morbid anxiety about the eyes has nothing to do with the castration-complex. For why does Hoffmann bring the anxiety about eyes into such intimate connection with the father's death? And why does the Sand-Man appear each time in order to interfere with love? He divides the unfortunate Nathaniel from his betrothed and from her brother, his best friend; he destroys his second object of love, Olympia, the lovely doll; and he drives him into suicide at the moment when he has won back his Clara and is about to be happily united to her. Things like these and many more seem arbitrary and meaningless in the story so long as we deny all connection between fears about the eye and castration, but they become intelligible as soon as we replace the Sand-Man by the dreaded father at whose hands castration is awaited.

Footnotes

8 In fact, Hoffmann’s imaginative treatment of his material has not played such havoc with its elements that we cannot reconstruct their original arrangement. In the story from Nathaniel’s childhood, the figures of his father and Coppelius represent the two opposites into which the father-imago is split by the ambivalence of the child’s feeling; whereas the one threatens to blind him, that is, to castrate him, the other, the loving father, intercedes for his sight. That part of the complex which is most strongly repressed, the death-wish against the father, finds expression in the death of the good father, and Coppelius is made answerable for it. Later, in his student days, Professor Spalanzani and Coppola the optician reproduce this double representation of the father-imago, the Professor as a member of the father-series, Coppola openly identified with the lawyer Coppelius. Just as before they used to work together over the fire, so now they have jointly created the doll Olympia; the Professor is even called the father of Olympia. This second occurrence of work in common shows that the optician and the mechani cian are also components of the father-imago, that is, both are Nathaniel’s father as well as Olympia’s. I ought to have added that in the terrifying scene in childhood, Coppelius, after sparing Nathaniel’s eyes, had screwed off his arms and legs as an experiment; that is, he had experimented on him as a mechanician would on a doll. This singular feature, which seems quite out of perspective in the picture of the Sand-Man, introduces a new castration-equivalent; but it also emphasizes the identity of Coppelius and his later counterpart, Spalanzani the mechanician, and helps us to understand who Olympia is. She, the automatic doll, can be nothing else than a personification of Nathaniel’s feminine attitude towards his father in his infancy. The father of both, Spalanzani and Coppola, are, as we know, new editions, reincarnations of Nathaniel’s “two” fathers. Now Spalaazani’s otherwise incomprehensible statement that the optician has stolen Nathaniel’s eyes so as to set them in the doll becomes significant and supplies fresh evidence for the identity of Olympia and Nathaniel. Olympia is, as it were, a dissociated complex of Nathaniel’s which confronts him as a person, and Nathaniel’s enslavement to this complex is expressed in his senseless obsessive love for Olympia. We may with justice call such love narcissistic, and can understand why he who has fallen victim to it should relinquish his real, external object of love. The psychological truth of the situation in which the young man, fixated upon his father by his castration-complex, is incapable of loving a woman, is amply proved by numerous analyses of patients whose story, though less fantastic, is hardly less tragic than that of the student Nathaniel. Hoffmann was the child of an unhappy marriage. When he was three years old, his father left his small family, never to be united to them again. According to Grisebach, in his biographical introduction to Hoffmann’s works, the writer’s relation to his father was always a most sensitive subject with him.

We shall venture, therefore, to refer the uncanny effect of the Sand-Man to the child's dread in relation to its castration complex. But having gained the idea that we can take this infantile factor to account for feelings of uncanniness, we are drawn to examine whether we can apply it to other instances of uncanny things. We find in the story of the Sand-Man the other theme upon which Jentsch lays stress, of a doll that appears to be alive. Jentsch believes that a particularly favourable condition for awakeninguncanny sensations is created when there is intellectual uncertainty whether an object is alive or not, and when an inanimate object may be taken to be alive; or conversely, when a lifeless object may be endowed with life.

[The preceding text discusses the Sand-Man, and the following text refers back to it].

The figures of Coppelius and Spalanzani are also components of the father image, that is, both are Nathanial's father as well as Olympia's. I might have added that in the terrifying scene in childhood, Coppelius, after sparing Nathaniel's eyes, had screwed off his arms and legs as an experiment; that is, he had experimented on him as a mechanician would on a doll. This singular feature, which seems quite out of perspective in the picture of the Sand-Man, induces a new castration-equivalent, but it also emphasizes the identity of Coppelius and his later counterpart, Spalanzani the mechanician, and helps us to understand who Olympia is. She, the automatic doll, can be nothing else than a personification of Nathaniel's feminine attitude towards his father in his infancy. The father of both, Spalanzani and Coppelius, are, as we know, new editions, reincarnations of Nathaniel's "two" fathers. Now Spalanzani's otherwise incomprehensible statement that the optician has stolen Nathaniel's eyes so as to set them in the doll becomes significant and supplies fresh evidence for the identity of Olympia and Nathaniel. Olympia is, as it were, a dissociated complex of Nathaniel's which confronts him as a person, and Nathaniel's endorsement to this complex is expressed in his senseless obsessive love for Olympia. We may with justice call such love narcissistic, and can understand why he who has fallen victim to it should relinquish his real, external object of love. The psychological truth of the situation in which the young man, fixated upon his father by his castration-complex, is incapable of loving a woman, is amply proved by numerous analyses of patients whose story, though less fantastic, is hardly less tragic than that of the student Nathaniel.

Hoffmann was the child of an unhappy marriage. When he was three years old, his father left his small family, never to be united to them again. According to Grisebach, in his biographical introduction to Hoffmann's works, the writer's relation to his father was always a most sensitive subject with him.

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Jentsch believes that a particularly favourable condition for awakening uncanny sensations is created when there is intellectual uncertainty whether an object is alive or not, and when an inanimate object becomes too much like an animate one. Now, dolls happen to be rather closely connected with infantile life. We remember that in their early games children do not distinguish at all sharply between living and lifeless objects, and that they are especially fond of treating their dolls like live people. In fact I have occasionally heard a woman patient declare that even at the age of eight she had still been convinced that her dolls would be certain to come to life if she were to look at them in a particular way, with as concentrated a gaze as possible. So that here, too, it is not difficult to discover a factor from childhood; but curiously enough, while the Sand-Man story deals with the excitation of an early childhood fear, the idea of a “living doll” excites no fear at all; the child had no fear of its doll coming to life, it may even have desired it. The source of the feeling of an uncanny thing would not, therefore, be an infantile fear in this case, but rather an infantile wish or even only an infantile belief. There seems to be a contradiction here; but perhaps it is only a complication, which may be helpful to us later on.

Hoffmann is in literature the unrivalled master of conjuring up the uncanny. His Elixire des Teufels [The Devil’s Elixir] contains a mass of themes to which one is tempted to ascribe the uncanny effect of the narrative; but it is too obscure and intricate a story to venture to summarize. Towards the end of the book the reader is told the facts, from which the action springs; with the result, not that he is at last enlightened, but that he falls into a state of complete bewilderment. The author has piled up too much of a kind; one’s comprehension of the whole suffers as a result, though not the impression it makes. We must content ourselves with selecting those themes of uncanniness which are most prominent, and seeing whether we can fairly trace then also back to infantile sources. These themes are all concerned with the idea of a "double" in every shape and degree, with persons, therefore, who are to be considered identical by reason of looking alike; Hoffmann accentuates this relation by transferring mental processes from the one person to the other—what we should call telepathy—so that the one possesses knowledge, feeling and experience in common with the other, identifies himself with another person, so that his self becomes confounded, or the foreign self is substituted for his own—in other words, by doubling, dividing and interchanging the self.

sons, therefore, who are to be considered identical by reason of looking alike; Hoffmann accentuates this relation by transferring mental processes from the one person to the other—what we should call telepathy—so that the one possesses knowledge, feeling and experience in common with the other, identifies himself with another person, so that his self becomes confounded, or the foreign self is substituted for his own—in other words, by doubling, dividing and interchanging the self. And finally there is the constant recurrence of similar situations, a same face, or character-trait, or twist of fortune, or a same crime, or even a same name recurring throughout several consecutive generations.

The theme of the “double” has been very thoroughly treated by Otto Rank. He has gone into the connections the “double” has with reflections in mirrors, with shadows, guardian spirits, with the belief in the soul and the fear of death; but he also lets in a flood of light on the astonishing evolution of this idea. For the “double” was originally an insurance against destruction to the ego, an “energetic denial of the power of death,” as Rank says; and probably the “immortal” soul was the first “double” of the body. This invention of doubling as a preservation against extinction has its counterpart in the language of dreams, which is fond of representing castration by a doubling or multiplication of the genital symbol; the same desire spurred on the ancient Egyptians to the art of making images of the dead in some lasting material. Such ideas, however, have sprung from the soil of unbounded self-love, from the primary narcissism which holds sway in the mind of the child as in that of primitive man; and when this stage has been left behind the double takes on a different aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, he becomes the ghastly harbinger of death.

Footnotes

⁹ "Der Doppelgänger."

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The idea of the "double" does not necessarily disappear with the passing of the primary narcissism, for it can receive fresh meaning from the later stages of development of the ego. A special faculty is slowly formed there, able to oppose the rest of the ego, with the function of observing and criticizing the self and exercising a censorship within the mind, and this we become aware of as our "conscience." In the pathological case of delusions of being watched this mental institution becomes isolated, dissociated from the ego, and discernible to a physician’s eye. The fact that a faculty of this kind exists, which is able to treat the rest of the ego like an object—the fact, that, is, that man is capable of self-observation—renders it possible to invest the old idea of a "double" with a new meaning and to ascribe many things to it, above all, those things which seem to the new faculty of self-criticism to belong to the old surmounted narcissism of the earliest period of all.

But it is not only this narcissism, offensive to the ego-criticizing faculty, which may be incorporated in the idea of a double. There are also all those unfulfilled but possible futures to which we still like to cling in phantasy, all those strivings of the ego which adverse external circumstances have crushed, and all our suppressed acts of volition which nourish in us the illusion of Free Will. 11

Footnotes

10 - I cannot help thinking that when poets complain that two souls dwell within the human breast, and when popular psychologists talk of the splitting of the ego in an individual, they have some notice of this division which relates to the sphere of ego-psychology: between the critical faculty and the rest of the ego, and not of the antithesis discovered by psychoanalysis between the ego and what is unconscious and repressed. It is true that the distinction is to some extent effaced by the circumstance that derivatives of what is repressed are feminine among the things apprehended by the ego-criticizing faculty.

11 – In Ewers’ Der Student von Prag, which furnishes the starting-point of Rank's study on the "double," the hero has promised his beloved not to kill his antagonist in a duel. But on his way to the dueling ground he meets his "double," who has already killed his rival.

But, after having thus considered the manifest motivation of the figure of a "double," we have to admit that none of it helps us to understand the extraordinarily strong feeling of something uncanny that pervades the conception; and our knowledge of pathological mental processes enables us to add that nothing in the content arrived at could account for that impulse towards self-protection which has caused the ego to project such a content outward as something foreign to itself. The quality of uncanniness can only come from the circumstance of the "double" being a creation dating back to a very early mental stage, long since left behind, and one, no doubt, in which it wore a more friendly aspect. The "double" has become a vision ofterror, just as after the fall of their religion the gods took on daemonic shapes.¹²

It is not difficult to judge, on the same lines as his theme of the "double," the other forms of disturbance in the ego made use of by Hoffmann. They are a harking-back to particular phases in the evolution of the self-regarding feeling, a regression to a time when the ego was not yet sharply differentiated from the external world and from other persons. I believe that these factors are partly responsible for the impression of the uncanny, although it is not easy to isolate and determine exactly their share of it.

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ter of which could not long remain in doubt. Nothing but painted women were to be seen at the windows of the small houses, and I hastened to leave the narrow street at the next turning. But after having wandered about for a while without being directed, I suddenly found myself back in the same street, where my presence was now beginning to excite attention. I hurried away once more, but only to arrive yet a third time by devious paths in the same place. Now, however, a feeling overcame me which I can only describe as uncanny, and I was glad enough to abandon my exploratory walk and get straight back to the piazza I had left a short while before. Other situations having in common with my adventure an involuntary return to the same situation, but which differ radically from it in other respects, also result in the same feeling of helplessness and of something uncanny. As, for instance, when one is lost in a forest in high altitudes, caught, we will suppose, by the mountain mist, and when every endeavor to find the marked or familiar path ends again and again in a return to one and the same spot, recognizable by some particular landmark. Or when one wanders about in a dark, strange room, looking for the door or the electric switch, and collides for the hundredth time with the same piece of furniture—a situation which, indeed, has been made irresistibly comic by Mark Twain, through the wild extravagance of his narration.

Taking another class of things, it is easy to see that here, too, it is only this factor of involuntary repetition which surrounds with an uncanny atmosphere what would otherwise be innocent enough, and forces upon us the idea of something fateful and unescapable where otherwise we should have spoken of “chance” only. For instance, we of course attach no importance to the event when we give up a coat and get a cloakroom ticket with the number, say, 62; or when we find that our cabin on board ship is numbered 62. But the impression is altered if two such events, each

in itself indifferent, happen close together, if we come across the number 62 several times in a single day, or if we begin to notice that everything which has a number—addresses, hotel-rooms, compartments in railway-trains—always has the same one, or one which at least contains the same figures. We do feel this to be “uncanny,” and unless a man is utterly hardened and proof against the lure of superstition he will be tempted to ascribe a secret meaning to this obstinate recurrence of a number, taking it, perhaps, as an indication of the span of life allotted to him. Or take the case that one is engaged at the time in reading the works of Hering, the famous physiologist, and then receives within the space of a few days two letters from two different countries, each from a person called Hering; whereas one has never before had any dealings with anyone of that name. Not long ago an ingenious scientist attempted to reduce coincidences of this kind to certain laws, and so deprive them of their uncanny effect.13 I will not venture to decide whether he has succeeded or not.

How exactly we can trace back the uncanny effect of such recurrent similarities to infantile psychology is a question I can only lightly touch upon in these pages; and I must refer the reader instead to another pamphlet, now ready for publication, in which this has been gone into in detail, but in a different connection. It must be explained that we are able to postulate the principle of a repetition-compulsion in the unconscious mind, based upon instinctual activity and probably inherent in the very nature of the instincts—a principle powerful enough to overrule the pleasure-principle, lending to certain aspects of the mind their daemonic character, and still very clearly expressed in the tendencies of small children; a principle, too, which is responsible for a part of the course taken by the analyses of neurotic patients. Taken in all, the foregoing prepares us

13 P. Kammerer, Das Gesetz der Serie (Vienna, 1919).
14 [Beyond the Pleasure-Principle.—Trans.]