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The essay demonstrates the usefulness of moving away from a conceptualization of the uncanny as occurring outside the realm where the natural and social sciences operate and provide plausible explanations. The essay does this by juxtaposing an array of phenomena in which a person comes to know something about an “other mind” but there seems to be no adequate explanation for that knowledge. These phenomena—thought transference, one's discovery in oneself of a previously unconscious motive, and the infant/young child's preverbal knowledge of events in the lives of the primary caregiver—present different intensities of what might be experienced as uncanny. The essay suggests that psychoanalysis may have underestimated the degree to which “reality testing” takes place in humans (and nonhumans) but does so preconsciously and is subsequently often also caught up in conflicts of the dynamic unconscious. The essay argues that a view of the human mind as both separate from others and connected, as is proposed in Daniel Stern's hypotheses about
Dr. Allik is Associate Professor, Department of Religious Studies, Loyola University, New Orleans, and a candidate at the New Orleans Psychoanalytic Institute.
the development of the human infant, would have far-reaching effects, not just on how we conceptualize the uncanny, but also on therapeutic action, empathy, and human development.