Wednesday 16 November 2011

Sigmund Freud 'Uncanny'-extractions and notes

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'...We can collect all those properties of persons, things, sensations, experiences and situations which arouses in us the feeling of uncanniness, and then infer the unknown nature of the uncanny from what they all have in common... The 'uncanny' is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar... The familiar can become uncanny and frightening.

...We tempted to conclude that what is 'uncanny' is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar.

...Intellectual uncertainty: so that 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.

...According to him [Schelling] everything is uncanny that ought to have remained hidden and secret, and yet comes to light.

...'doubts whether an apparently animate being as really alive; or or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact aminate' (Jentsch)

...We know from psychoanalytic experience... that fear of damaging or loosing one's eyes is a terrible fear of childhood... No bodily injury is so much dreaded by them [adults] as an injury to the eye.

...It may be true that the uncanny is nothing else than a hidden, familiar thing that has undergone repression and then emerged from it, and that everything that is uncanny fulfils this condition. But these factors do not solve the problem of the uncanny. For our proposition is clearly not convertible. Not everything that fulfils this condition-not everything that is connected with repressed desires and archaic forms of thought belonging to the past of the individual and of the race-is therefore uncanny.

...An uncanny experience occurs either when repressed infantile complexes have been revived by some impression, or when the primitive beliefs we have surmounted seem once more to be confirmed.'


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