Freud's “Das Unheimliche”: the intricacies of textual uncanniness

Abstract

TEXT AND CONTEXTS Until fairly recently, Freud's essay “Das Unheimliche” [“The Uncanny”] (1919) did not receive as much attention as those works which had an undisputed importance for the evolution of psychoanalysis as a discipline, those writings that seemed to constitute major breakthroughs in theoretical insight, such as The Interpretation of Dreams, Beyond the Pleasure Principle , and Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety , to name just three obvious examples. “Das Unheimliche” is not only a short and, as we shall see, in many ways truncated text; it also seems to be somewhat marginal in the Freudian corpus, in that it deals with an issue whose aesthetic foundation would appear to be at least as important as its psychoanalytic resonance. It has the misfortune, as well, of preceding the genuinely revolutionary Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) by such a short time-span that Freud's interpreters have tended to “leap over” the essay on the uncanny so as to meet the later text, with its intriguing theorization of the “repetition compulsion” and the “death drive,” head-on. This situation changed as of the 1970s and early 1980s, when both French and Anglo-American scholars began to see in “Das Unheimliche” far more than its surface argument exhibited. To use Sarah Kofman's terminology, critics of various methodological persuasions began to read the essay symptomally .