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This is the tenth volume in The International Psychoanalytical Association's Contemporary Freud: Turning Points and Critical Issues series, that was initiated in 1991. Each volume of the series focuses on a significant paper by Freud and presents an array of responses from an international roster of psychoanalyst writers. This seems an ideal way of continuing the project of reading Freud into contemporaneity, gathering together a disparate group of theoretical approaches with a single focus, creating something that resembles the fabric, literally the texture of international psychoanalytic thought as it exists in the moment. Freud's (1919) The ‘Uncanny‘ is a particularly evocative text for such a project at this moment in psychoanalytic history. It marks a theoretical watershed for Freud as his theory began to shift from the topographical to the structural. In raising up the themes of the threat of castration, the role of the double or doppelganger, including the role of the mirror-double, and the compulsion to repeat, linked with the maternal body and genitals and the threats they pose to the emerging ego, Freud moves his theory into the territory of primary narcissism, incipient notions of projective identification, as well as elaborations of the super-ego.
Freud's genius in using E.T.A. Hoffman's tale, The Sandman, to speak about the uncanny enacts the ambiguities contained in the notion: the merging of the seeming opposite German terms heimlich and un-heimlich, and the difficulty in distinguishing between what might be the active repression at work in the compulsion to repeat and the more passive experience of the return of the repressed in material reality. The uncanny is both an enigmatic concept and an experience of the enigmatic erupting into the quotidian. The eight writers collected in this volume are analysts from Europe, Britain, North and South America. They address the uncanny in contemporary theoretical terms, drawing in the feminine and maternal beyon