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June 20, 2007
Das Unheimliche" is an essay written by Freud in 1919 in which the phenomenon of the uncanny is approached from various angles: language and semantics versus experience; literature and myth versus everyday life and psychoanalytic practice; the individual feeling versus the universal phenomenon. Freud's essay is a direct response to the psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch's study "Über die Psychologie des Unheimlichen" (translated as "On the Psychology of the Uncanny"). For Freud, as for Jentsch, the uncanny is a specific - mild - form of anxiety, related to certain phenomena in real life and to certain motives in art, especially in fantastic literature.
From the outset of his investigation, Freud qualifies the uncanny as an aesthetic experience. Aesthetic is here used in the broad sense of "the study of the qualities of our sentiments" as opposed to the narrow sense, "the study of the beautiful", which, according to Freud, limits its scope to positive feelings. The fact that the uncanny is related to aesthetics also accounts for the subjectivity of the experience: Freud insists that not everyone is equally susceptible to the feeling of the uncanny, and the list of phenomena is neither conclusive, nor generally accepted.
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the uncanny is also transitory....fleeting. I think it was Callaso that wrote about this in Literature and the Gods. In any event, this seems (the uncanny) to always link up with the idea of surprise in art....dance is just a variation, a surprising one, in conventional movement. The eliptical also...(writers like Juan Rolfo, or Pinter) and filmakers like Fassbinder. Leaving the logical connection out of the narration.....and since anxiety is directionless, I would maybe argue that the uncanny is too....its dream like....timeless and directionless. Does this bring us to how we relate to the *idea* of mystery? I dont know.