THE UNCANNY

The uncanny is a term that troubles definitions. Ernst Jentsch's 1906 essay ‘On The Psychology of the Uncanny’ [Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen] ventured an equation of the uncanny with the unfamiliar, but it was Sigmund Freud who both popularised the term for modern usage and uncovered its ambiguity in his 1919 essay ‘The Uncanny’ (Das Unheimliche). Freud shows that heimlich contains its own duality, as it means both the familiar, or homely, and the secret, or hidden: its ambivalence of meaning thus develops and coincides with the unheimlich, the unhomely. That paradox of the uncanny thus unfolds first in language and is captured in the signifier in which the concept is formalised. Taking E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’ [Der Sandmann] as a case study, Freud demonstrates how what returns in the uncanny encounter with the Sandman, who threatens to remove children's eyes, is the suppression of a childhood fear of blinding resulting in the castration complex. The essay brings together PSYCHOANALYSIS and aesthetics in a literary reading that excavates Friedrich Schelling's definition, quoted by Freud, of the uncanny as a revelation of that which is hidden coming to light; building on Jentsch, Freud designates the uncanny not as the unfamiliar but as the affective sensation evoked by that class of things that are at once strange and known: objects and experiences of the uncanny retain a fundamental ambivalence, revealing in the frightening a repression of that which has already been.

READING

Freud, Sigmund (2001) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVII, ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Vintage, pp. 217–56.

Masschelein, Anneleen (2012) The Unconcept: The Freudian Uncanny in Late Twentieth-Century Theory. New York: SUNY Press.

Royle, Nicholas (2003) The Uncanny. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Weber, Samuel (1973) ‘The Sideshow, or: Remarks on a Canny Moment’, MLN, 88 (6): 1102–33.

URANIANISM

The German jurist and homophile campaigner Karl Heinrich Ulrichs first coined the terms ‘Uranier’ and ‘Urning’ in the 1860s. Drawing on the discussion of Uranian love in Plato's Symposium, Ulrichs sought to offer an affirmative explanation of same-sex desire between men.