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Gregorio Kohon's volume on the uncanny and aesthetic experience expands our understanding of both the unknown and the unknowable in artistic representations. We finish Kohon's book convinced that the uncanny is more than a detachable dimension hidden in the depths or looming over the outer reaches of art. Rather, the uncanny is intrinsic to our aesthetic experience and it reverberates within other discoveries. His uncanny connects to disruption and disorientation in artistic encounters—confronting the uncanny in creative work throws us off balance, while rebalancing requires a subtle reorienting. We find our feet on unfamiliar ground and return to a no-longer-comforting earth.
Kohon begins with a classic comprehension of the uncanny, Freud's adoption of Schelling's “that [which] ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light” (Freud, 1919, p. 225). But this fundamental definition undergoes variations and transformations as the author's Reflections continues. Early in the first chapter Kohon brings forward Richard Eyre's London 1980 production of Hamlet. He introduces an internalized Ghost of the Father; the Ghost's voice emanating from within the Prince of Denmark expresses an alien figure within the self of the protagonist. Relating this to the Jewish legend of the Dybbuk, Kohon invokes motifs like the usurpation by a demon and the being possessed by supernatural forces. He notes that the actor, Martyn Price, had recently lost his father, blurring the line between reality and fantasy in uncanny uncertainty.
Kohon makes connections here, and elsewhere in his informative study, of an allusive and theoretical kind, while overlooking specific textual and psychoanalytical dimensions in the works he presents. For example, in this version of Hamlet, with its internal dialogue between father and son, the voice of the vengeful father suggests a draconian superego, a dominating presence demanding not only loyalty but a total submission of being from Hamlet. The