TALES OF THE UNCANNY — A Freudian Horror

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CHAPTER I: A SPECIAL CORE OF FEELING

Good eeevening, dear reader... Shortly after World War I in 1919, I sought to explore what I called "a special core of feeling" present in the uncanny. I did so by both exploring the etymology and usage of the words heimlich and unheimlich; and the appearances of the uncanny in art, particularly writing...

While on the surface the uncanny is frightening because it is the opposite of the familiar, I suggest it is more complicated than that especially when novel things are concerned. "Some new things are frightening but not by any means all," I remark. "Something has to be added to what is novel and unfamiliar in order to make it uncanny." Heh heh heh...

The Uncanny stands in opposition to the heimlich, what is in the lexicon Freud shares from Theodor Reik that follows, homely, "belonging to the house or the family," contained, "of animals: tame, companionable to man," as opposed to wild. Heimlich also means "intimate, friendlily comfortable."

However, the further definition of heimlich pivots until it becomes almost synonymous with the unheimlich/uncanny—"Concealed, kept from sight, so that others do not get to know of or about it, withheld from others." Heimlich can also be used in ways that describe the occult or unconscious, with the "notion of something hidden and dangerous." (Grimm, 1877)

Freud concludes that heimlich is not unambiguous, and has two very different sets of ideas. He is most taken by Schelling's definition of the uncanny as "the name for everything that ought to have remained... secret and hidden but has come to light."

"The uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar." —Freud, 1919

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CHAPTER II: THE TALE OF THE SAND-MAN

What "things, persons, events and situations... are able to arouse in us a feeling of the uncanny?" For Freud and his contemporary Jentsch, one good example of the uncanny casts "'doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate'; and he refers in this connection to the impression made by waxwork figures, ingeniously constructed dolls and automata."

Freud uses as an example a story by Hoffmann of the Sand Man, a gothic tale of a man who among other things falls in love with Olympia, the "beautiful, but strangely silent and motionless," daughter of an inventor. Nathaniel "soon falls in love with her... violently, forgetting his fiancée in the process."

Then, the big reveal—Olympia is a clockwork automaton, a "wooden doll" made by him with apparently human parts including "bleeding eyes" that are ripped out and found on the floor.

Let us be uncareful here, an automaton, a robot, a cyborg with human parts that define her/its inhumanity?

Nathaniel, unsurprisingly goes mad in the story, but not before we are treated to themes of the living being confused with the inanimate, "being robbed of one's eyes," and the uncanny feeling arising from the uncertainty whether an object is living or inanimate.

KRAKK!

Hopefully, echoes of recent stories about AI user delusions which have appeared in media, are coming up in your associations to this prose that has turned purple in the wake of history.

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CHAPTER III: THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

Although Freud focuses on the interpretation of the loss of eyes as a form of castration anxiety, I'd like to offer a variation on this, namely; that the loss of eyes represents the loss of an ability to discern between what is real and unreal, living and inanimate, which precedes the uncanny.

There is something threateningly regressive to Freud and many about the failure to distinguish between animate and inanimate objects. He associates this to childishness... heh heh heh.

"Dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist... feet which dance by themselves... all these have something peculiarly uncanny about them, especially when... they prove capable of independent activity."

"dolls are of course closely connected with childhood life... in their early games children do not distinguish at all sharply between living and inanimate objects, and in fact they are especially fond of treating their dolls like live people."

"Nowadays we no longer believe in them, we have surmounted these modes of thought; but we do not feel quite sure of our new beliefs, and the old ones still exist within us ready to seize upon any confirmation. As soon as something actually happens in our life which seems to confirm the old discarded beliefs we get a feeling of the uncanny."

* Whether infantile and to be repressed, or primitive to be surmounted, the uncanny, linked to the ontological space of originary technicity, the transitional space of play and the disruptive space of decolonialism, should be considered a momentary lapse in judgment that proves the rules of everyday life.

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CHAPTER IV: THE MACHINE IN THE GHOST

"I should not be surprised to hear that psychoanalysis, which is concerned with laying bare these hidden forces, has itself become uncanny to many people for that very reason." —Freud

The philosopher Arthur Bradley points out that Freud, largely in opposition to Rationalism, never quite achieves escape velocity from it because of his humanism. Freud frequently used the imagery and analogy of machines to describe the psyche and the unconscious (clock, train engine, the Mystic Writing Pad.) But he is "always attempting to short-circuit this feedback loop by insisting on the primary, organic status of the psyche itself." (Bradley, 2011)

The psyche repeats itself like a machine because the psyche IS a machine. Neural networks are modeled on the brain because the brain IS a very sophisticated wetware network.

We want to locate what makes us us within our human bodies, forgetting that what made our cousin go extinct thousands of years ago was just that error; and what has helped us persist is the ability to extend ourselves beyond the part of us that is human.

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CHAPTER V: A WORLD ON FIRE

AND YET—

And yet, we live in a world on fire, where often secret powers do exist, where some forms of thought external to us do seem to heading toward what we would have considered omnipotence. Where the thoughts of at least some in power can translate nearly instantaneously to the deaths of those who have been labeled subaltern, narco/terrorists, etc.

Freud's language in "The Uncanny" is often rife with colonialist dualisms, including the linking of animism, infantile or childhood perceptions of reality, and the "savage" all of which come to bear on the themes of the human and the machine, animate and inanimate.

One way the strand of originary technicity may interweave with that of colonialism is resisting the urge to universalize all values of technology. Historically, different groups have had different responses to new technologies, which tend towards democratization and the disruption of existing systems of power. Whether it be language or cryptocurrency, part of what decentralization means is that different groups will have different needs and responses, values and exploitations as AI emerges, and we can't foresee them all from our own place in a system.

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CHAPTER VI: THE CYBORG POSITION

What I have been discussing here is in fact a form of splitting, in which a dyad is split into two allegedly unlinked things, and then further split with investing high idealization of devaluation on one side of the equation.

Perhaps the cyborg is an example of reaching a depressive position of sorts: We may not be able to put the genie of originary technicity back in the bottle, or to mix metaphors cram Olympia's bleeding eyes back into the automaton, but perhaps we can move forward anew with the cyborg body, the hybrid she describes in her Cyborg Manifesto.

And THAT, dear readers, is tonight's tale! The uncanny isn't a bug—it's a FEATURE. The familiar was ALWAYS strange. The human was ALWAYS entangled with the machine. Sleep TIGHT... heh heh heh.

⚰ NEXT ISSUE: "THE RETURN OF THE MYSTIC WRITING PAD" — Lacan meets the Large Language Model! DON'T MISS IT! ⚰