Freud - Complete Works (613 page)

  
¹
I believe that when poets complain that two
souls dwell in the human breast, and when popular psychologists
talk of the splitting of people’s egos, what they are
thinking of is this division (in the sphere of ego-psychology)
between the critical agency and the rest of the ego, and not the
antithesis discovered by psycho-analysis between the ego and what
is unconscious and repressed. It is true that the distinction
between these two antitheses is to some extent effaced by the
circumstance that foremost among the things that are rejected by
the criticism of the ego are derivatives of the
repressed.

The 'Uncanny'

3688

   But it is not only this latter
material, offensive as it is to the criticism of the ego, which may
be incorporated in the idea of a double. There are also all the
unfulfilled but possible futures to which we still like to cling in
phantasy, all the 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.¹

   But after having thus considered
the
manifest
motivation of the figure of a
‘double’, we have to admit that none of this 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
this more superficial material could account for the urge towards
defence which has caused the ego to project that material outward
as something foreign to itself. When all is said and done, the
quality of uncanniness can only come from the fact of the
‘double’ being a creation dating back to a very early
mental stage, long since surmounted - a stage, incidentally, at
which it wore a more friendly aspect. The ‘double’ has
become a thing of terror, just as, after the collapse of their
religion, the gods turned into demons.²

   The other forms of
ego-disturbance exploited by Hoffmann can easily be estimated along
the same lines as the theme of the ‘double’. They are a
harking-back to particular phases in the evolution of the
self-regarding feeling, a regression to a time when the ego had not
yet marked itself off sharply from the external world and from
other people. I believe that these factors are partly responsible
for the impression of uncanniness, although it is not easy to
isolate and determine exactly their share of it.

  
¹
In Ewers’s
Der Student von
Prag
, which serves as 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
duelling-ground he meets his ‘double’, who has already
killed his rival.

  
²
Heine,
Die Götter im
Exil
.

The 'Uncanny'

3689

   The factor of the repetition of
the same thing will perhaps not appeal to everyone as a source of
uncanny feeling. From what I have observed, this phenomenon does
undoubtedly, subject to certain conditions and combined with
certain circumstances, arouse an uncanny feeling, which,
furthermore, recalls the sense of helplessness experienced in some
dream states. As I was walking, one hot summer afternoon, through
the deserted streets of a provincial town in Italy which was
unknown to me, I found myself in a quarter of whose character I
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 time without enquiring my way, I suddenly found myself
back in the same street, where my presence was now beginning to
excite attention. I hurried away once more, only to arrive by
another
détour
at the same place yet a third time.
Now, however, a feeling overcame me which I can only describe as
uncanny, and I was glad enough to find myself back at the piazza I
had left a short while before, without any further voyages of
discovery. Other situations which have in common with my adventure
an unintended recurrence of the same situation, but which differ
radically from it in other respects, also result in the same
feeling of helplessness and of uncanniness. So, for instance, when,
caught in a mist perhaps, one has lost one’s way in a
mountain forest, every attempt to find the marked or familiar path
may bring one back again and again to one and the same spot, which
one can identify by some particular landmark. Or one may wander
about in a dark, strange room, looking for the door or the electric
switch, and collide time after time with the same piece of
furniture - though it is true that Mark Twain succeeded by wild
exaggeration in turning this latter situation into something
irresistibly comic.

   If we take another class of
things, it is easy to see that there, too, it is only this factor
of involuntary repetition which surrounds what would otherwise be
innocent enough with an uncanny atmosphere, and forces upon us the
idea of something fateful and inescapable when otherwise we should
have spoken only of ‘chance’. For instance, we
naturally attach no importance to the event when we hand in an
overcoat and get a cloak room ticket with the number, let us say,
62; or when we find that our cabin on a ship bears that number. 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 - invariably has the same one, or at
all events one which 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; he will take it,
perhaps, as an indication of the span of life allotted to him. Or
suppose one is engaged in reading the works of the famous
physiologist, Hering, and within the space of a few days receives
two letters from two different countries, each from a person called
Hering, though one has never before had any dealings with anyone of
that name. Not long ago an ingenious scientist (Kammerer, 1919)
attempted to reduce coincidences of this kind to certain laws, and
so deprive them of their uncanny effect. I will not venture to
decide whether he has succeeded or not.

The 'Uncanny'

3690

   How exactly we can trace back to
infantile psychology the uncanny effect of such similar recurrences
is a question I can only lightly touch on in these pages; and I
must refer the reader instead to another work, already completed,
in which this has been gone into in detail, but in a different
connection. For it is possible to recognize the dominance in the
unconscious mind of a ‘compulsion to repeat’ proceeding
from the instinctual impulses and probably inherent in the very
nature of the instincts - a compulsion powerful enough to overrule
the pleasure principle, lending to certain aspects of the mind
their daemonic character, and still very clearly expressed in the
impulses of small children; a compulsion, too, which is responsible
for a part of the course taken by the analyses of neurotic
patients. All these considerations prepare us for the discovery
that whatever reminds us of this inner ‘compulsion to
repeat’ is perceived as uncanny.

   Now, however, it is time to turn
from these aspects of the matter, which are in any case difficult
to judge, and look for some undeniable instances of the uncanny, in
the hope that an analysis of them will decide whether our
hypothesis is a valid one.

   In the story of ‘The Ring
of Polycrates’, the King of Egypt turns away in horror from
his host, Polycrates, because he sees that his friend’s every
wish is at once fulfilled, his every care promptly removed by
kindly fate. His host has become ‘uncanny’ to him. His
own explanation, that the too fortunate man has to fear the envy of
the gods, seems obscure to us; its meaning is veiled in
mythological language. We will therefore turn to another example in
a less grandiose setting. In the case history of an obsessional
neurotic,¹ I have described how the patient once stayed in a
hydropathic establishment and benefited greatly by it. He had the
good sense, however, to attribute his improvement not to the
therapeutic properties of the water, but to the situation of his
room, which immediately adjoined that of a very accommodating
nurse. So on his second visit to the establishment he asked for the
same room, but was told that it was already occupied by an old
gentleman, whereupon he gave vent to his annoyance in the words:
‘I wish he may be struck dead for it.’ A fortnight
later the old gentleman really did have a stroke. My patient
thought this an ‘uncanny’ experience. The impression of
uncanniness would have been stronger still if less time had elapsed
between his words and the untoward event, or if he had been able to
report innumerable similar coincidences. As a matter of fact, he
had no difficulty in producing coincidences of this sort; but then
not only he but every obsessional neurotic I have observed has been
able to relate analogous experiences. They are never surprised at
their invariably running up against someone they have just been
thinking of, perhaps for the first time for a long while. If they
say one day ‘I haven’t had any news of so-and-so for a
long time’, they will be sure to get a letter from him the
next morning, and an accident or a death will rarely take place
without having passed through their mind a little while before.
They are in the habit of referring to this state of affairs in the
most modest manner, saying that they have
‘presentiments’ which ‘usually’ come
true.

  
¹
‘Notes upon a Case of Obsessional
Neurosis’ (1909
d
).

The 'Uncanny'

3691

   One of the most uncanny and
wide-spread forms of superstition is the dread of the evil eye,
which has been exhaustively studied by the Hamburg oculist
Seligmann (1910-11). There never seems to have been any doubt about
the source of this dread. Whoever possesses something that is at
once valuable and fragile is afraid of other people’s envy,
in so far as he projects on to them the envy he would have felt in
their place. A feeling like this betrays itself by a look even
though it is not put into words; and when a man is prominent owing
to noticeable, and particularly owing to unattractive, attributes,
other people are ready to believe that his envy is rising to a more
than usual degree of intensity and that this intensity will convert
it into effective action. What is feared is thus a secret intention
of doing harm, and certain signs are taken to mean that that
intention has the necessary power at its command.

   These last examples of the
uncanny are to be referred to the principle which I have called
‘omnipotence of thoughts’, taking the name from an
expression used by one of my patients. And now we find ourselves on
familiar ground. Our analysis of instances of the uncanny has led
us back to the old, animistic conception of the universe. This was
characterized by the idea that the world was peopled with the
spirits of human beings; by the subject’s narcissistic
overvaluation of his own mental processes; by the belief in the
omnipotence of thoughts and the technique of magic based on that
belief; by the attribution to various outside persons and things of
carefully graded magical powers, or ‘
mana
’; as
well as by all the other creations with the help of which man, in
the unrestricted narcissism of that stage of development, strove to
fend off the manifest prohibitions of reality. It seems as if each
one of us has been through a phase of individual development
corresponding to this animistic stage in primitive men, that none
of us has passed through it without preserving certain residues and
traces of it which are still capable of manifesting themselves, and
that everything which now strikes us as ‘uncanny’
fulfils the condition of touching those residues of animistic
mental activity within us and bringing them to
expression.¹

   At this point I will put forward
two considerations which, I think, contain the gist of this short
study. In the first place, if psycho-analytic theory is correct in
maintaining that every affect belonging to an emotional impulse,
whatever its kind, is transformed, if it is repressed, into
anxiety, then among instances of frightening things there must be
one class in which the frightening element can be shown to be
something repressed which
recurs
. This class of frightening
things would then constitute the uncanny; and it must be a matter
of indifference whether what is uncanny was itself originally
frightening or whether it carried some
other
affect. In the
second place, if this is indeed the secret nature of the uncanny,
we can understand why linguistic usage has extended
das
Heimliche
into its opposite,
das Unheimliche
(
p. 3680
); for this uncanny is in reality
nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and
old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it
only through the process of repression. This reference to the
factor of repression enables us, furthermore, to understand
Schelling’s definition of the uncanny as something which
ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.

  
¹
Cf. my book
Totem and Taboo
(1912-13), Essay III, ‘Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of
Thoughts’, where the following footnote will be found:
‘We appear to attribute an "uncanny" quality to
impressions that seek to confirm the omnipotence of thoughts and
the animistic mode of thinking in general, after we have reached a
stage at which, in our
judgement
, we have abandoned such
beliefs.’