You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
At the beginning of his article (1919) Freud presents a preliminary result of his investigation, stating that:
the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar. How this is possible, in what circumstances the familiar can become uncanny and frightening, I shall show in what follows….
The German word ‘unheimlich’ is obviously the opposite of heimlich' [‘homely’], ‘heimisch’ [‘native’] - the opposite of what is familiar; and we are tempted to conclude that what is ‘uncanny’ is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar. Naturally not everything that is new and unfamiliar is frightening, however; the relation is not capable of inversion. We can only say that what is novel can easily become frightening and uncanny; some new things are frightening but not by any means all. Something has to be added to what is novel and unfamiliar in order to make it uncanny.
Freud quotes Jentsch as saying that the uncanny is related to what is new, with what is unfamiliar. Freud continues:
He [Jentsch] ascribes the essential factor in the production of the feeling of uncanniness to intellectual uncertainty: so that the uncanny would always, as it were, be something one does not know one's way about in.228