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The trope of haunting is becoming increasingly familiar. Its fullest exploration in the recent academic literature is that by Avery Gordon (1997), who has a clear idea that haunting is a social phenomenon, an index of oppression. She writes, “I used the term haunting to describe those singular yet repetitive instances when home becomes unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction, when the over-and-done-with comes alive, when what's been in your blind spot comes into view. Haunting raises specters, and it alters the experience of being in time, the way we separate the past, the present, and the future” (p. xvi). One of Gordon's base disciplines for her exploration is psychoanalysis, even though she is also critical of it. She credits psychoanalysis with being “the only human science that has taken haunting seriously as an object of analysis;” but, she writes, “psychoanalysis does not know as much about haunting as it might seem” (p. 27). This is because it (or at least Freud, with whom she deals) tries to reduce haunting to what comes from the unconscious and so is an affair based on repression, which means that it can be exorcised through the usual process of “identifying the visible and disquieting symptoms of repression and bringing their origins and nature to light” (p. 53). For Gordon, Freud's troubled awareness that there might be something real about ghosts, in the sense that one is haunted by things that actually exist, has been occluded here. This is what we have to get back to, she suggests: “The ‘reality-testing’ that we might want to perform in the face of hauntings must first of all admit those hauntings as real” (p. 53).