Narcissism, Continuity and the Uncanny

For many years no county fair in France was complete without an exhibit of the fabulous 'Automate', an incredible device looking exactly like a man in street clothes but with chalk-white hands and face and a wide-eyed, unblinking stare, which stood with a slightly stiff or mechanical stance and, with almost imperceptibly saccadic movements, slowly poured itself a glass of wine, raised the glass to its lips, drained it and, as if with superhuman effort, tremulously produced a quasi-human, quasi-mechanical smile of satisfaction.

I recall inspecting this machine at close range for some time, filled with an uncanny sense of awe until, with a start of horror, I realized that this was not an almost perfect mechanical imitation of a man, but in fact a man who was imitating a machine.

I was reassured by friends who told me that the deception was so extraordinary that almost everyone was at first taken in and that this was an ancient skill, practised by a handful of performers and, interestingly enough, passed on only to their children.

Many years later the memory of this incident, together with the uncanny feelings it aroused, came back to me while talking with a patient who claimed that he felt like a machine and who indeed resembled the 'Automate' in many ways, even to his ghostly pallor.

In 1919 Freud, in the initial psychoanalytic investigation of the 'uncanny', had already connected the experience with a loss of the distinction between imagination and reality. He mentions that doubts about whether an object is animate or inanimate are a typical cause, and he concluded that an uncanny experience results either when repressed infantile complexes are revived, or when primitive beliefs which had been overcome appear suddenly to be confirmed once more.

Sachs (1933) viewed the failure of the Greeks to invent the machine as the result of a narcissistic over-valuation of the body, and connected this failure with uncanny feelings about machines and with the schizophrenic 'influenci