Rear Window: Double-Take, the Uncanny, and Glimpses of Mortality

Abstract

Drawing on American Psychoanalytic Association presentations with Ann Adelman and Stephanie Brody on psychoanalysis during Covid, the author explores the disruption to our everyday, taken-for-granted being-in-the-world of others, now supplanted by a new virtual world of presence that is nested within larger societal dislocations. With the stark foregrounding of the visual and auditory, and deprived of other sensory, bodily dimensions, comes an uncanny aura that signals shocks to our existential grounding. Exploring the uncanny similarities of our new virtual world with Hitchcock's Rear Window, Sartre's "look of the other", Lacan and Zizek on anamorphic distortions, and our omnipresent visual immersion in societal violence and fragmentation, this paper weaves connections to our contemporary existential challenges. We are penetrated by anxieties of isolation, loss, threat, and death—and we long to find our way back home within a brave, new world.