The Uncanny Workplace

The fact that dictionaries fail to agree completely on a definition of uncanny is perhaps, in and of itself, an uncanny occurrence, at least in the sense of uncanny that we hope to use consistently throughout this paper. (Whether we do use this slipperiest of concepts consistently is a matter for the reader to decide.) The writers and compilers of dictionaries, of course, have a job to make their contributions stand out from other similar publications, and a nod towards originality is expected.1 However, a failure to align semantically - which we might describe as a non-event, as something that did not happen - feels rich with hidden meaning, especially given that “the uncanny” attracts synonyms such as “weird”, “eerie” and (in particular) “unsettling”.

For instance, Cambridge Dictionary (2024) gives us: “strange or mysterious, often in a way that is slightly frightening”. Collins (2024) plumps for: “strange and difficult to explain”. Whereas Dictionary.com (2024) raises the bar somewhat with: “having or seeming to have a supernatural or inexplicable basis; beyond the ordinary or normal; extraordinary”. However, it is Wikipedia (2024) that adds the element of familiarity that is important for the purposes of this paper. Its entry reads: “The uncanny is the psychological experience of an event or individual being not simply mysterious, but rather frightening in a way that feels oddly familiar.”

The word for uncanny in Freud's native language of German is “unheimlich,” which we might translate as either “not of the home” or “not from the home”, and which (in turn) might lead us to a particular sense of unfamiliarity: the sense of something being hidden inside the home or something in plain sight within the home that takes on a new and unpleasant representation. For example, two people - let us say a husband and wife - are drinking a cup of tea in bed on a weekend morning; the scene is tranquil and unrushed. Early li