Uncanniness Sigmund Freud Analysis

Freud believes that fear of death is a primitive fear shared by all humans, which is true one hundred percent, and that traces back to the old belief that the deceased becomes the enemy of the survivor. From a scientific standpoint, part of the reason we fear death so much is because we know absolutely nothing about it, except that it is a guarantee. Freud shies away from stating death is the fate of absolutely every being by suggesting science has yet to discover a way to make it an avoidable event in life. In Freud’s opinion, one of the solutions humans have come up with to deal with this inevitable fate is to create what he calls the double. So the double is formed during the stage of primary narcissism where the child’s representation of the ego projects onto other objects as an extension of the self as an assurance of immortality. Once

So that not everything that returns from repression is uncanny. But return of the repressed is a necessary condition for the uncanny, and it is not a sufficient one. Something else must also be at play here in order to create the experience of the uncanny.

But Uncanniness was first explored psychologically by Ernst Jentsch in a 1906 essay, he defines the Uncanny as being a product of intellectual uncertainty, so that the uncanny would always as it were, be something one does not know one’s way about in. And the better oriented 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. Also he expands upon its use in fiction.

In telling a story one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton and to do it in such a way that his attention is not focused directly upon his uncertainty, so that he may not be led to go into the matter and clear it up