The Uncanny

Freud at first does not identify himself as the psychoanalyst, but uses the character of one to present his views of aesthetics. He makes them seem burdensome, unimportant nuisances to psychoanalysts who have “little to do” with something “subdued” and “remote”.

He provides his qualifications- or lack of them- by explaining his relationship with the word and phenomenon ‘uncanny’. He gives a background history of the previous study of this by Jentsch. He then lists two courses of action- like a thesis, a scientific method. Clearly thorough and scientific in his methods, Freud still reads rather easily and entertainingly. He rations his sentences, breaking them up to keep the reader from getting bogged down in them. Sentences that could have been clauses in longer, joined sentences, instead are separate ones that begin with “Or”, “And”, “Still”, or “So”. This also makes it easier to connect to the writer, because it seems like he is thinking of things as he goes along. Another instance of this is when he poses a problem that he does not immediately admit to having the answer to, as when he says “Let us bear this discovery in mind, though we cannot yet rightly understand it…If we go on to examine individual instances of uncanniness, these hints will become intelligible to us.” He also makes his essay accessible by telling us stories, though to show us really what he means by uncanny he could have taken a little more care with the storytelling, in order to give us that feeling.

One thing I like about Freud is that you can’t say he doesn’t define his terms. Even when going into extensive German Heimlichs and Unheimlichs, he makes sure to use them in usually very simple sentences such as “‘Animals which are neither wild nor heimlich’”. He uses multiple examples and metaphors to demonstrate his point, “the ‘double’ has with reflections in mirrors, with shadows, with guardian spirits, with the belief in the soul and with the fear of death; but he also lets in a flood of light on the surprising evolution of the idea.” He uses a mix of middle and high level words. They are sometimes technical but other times very straight-forward.