Chapter 4 In Defence of the Uncanny

‘Things are what they seem to be, or maybe something else’. This unsettling statement, which was the theme prescribed for a photography competition (Kalvar, 2011), captures how the uncanny both does and does not belong to everyday life. It is an ambush, making what should be familiar feel suddenly spooky and dislocated. Such eerie moments are not quite part of ordinary experience, and yet the feeling is recognisable. This is normal abnormality. When Freud wrote a book dealing with ‘unintentional’ slips of the tongue, ‘mistaken’ actions, and so on, he called it ‘The Psychopathology of Everyday Life’ . The paper he wrote about the uncanny shows him fascinated by it as a phenomenon, but in the end it seemed to him a similar intrusion of pathology into ordinary life (Freud, 1919b).

Freud admired and appreciated the deliberate use of the uncanny for artistic purposes, and a fascination with this continues today, often linked specifically to Freud’s paper. In 2008, a collection of short stories appeared, entitled The New Uncanny: Tales of Unease (Eyre and Page, 2008). It was generated by the editors’ idea of sending a copy of Freud’s paper to a number of authors and inviting them to write a story prompted by their reading of it. Where the visual arts are concerned, Caterina Albano’s (2008) article, ‘The uncanny: a dimension of contemporary art’, is an example. A book with the intriguing title, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, again draws on Freud’s paper, describing the uncanny as ‘a disquieting slippage between what is homely and what is definitively unhomely’ (Vidler, 1992: ix–x). In certain urban architectural environments, says the author, ‘subjectivity is rendered heterogeneous, nomadic, and self-critical in vagabond environments that refuse the commonplaces of hearth and home in favour of the uncertainties of no-man’s-land’ (Vidler, 1992: xiii). One may also be vagabond and nomadic, with commonplace assurances lost, in certain internal, psych