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In 1919, Freud wrote an essay called “Das Unheimliche” or in English, “The Uncanny.” Seemingly unrelated to the title is another German word, Heimlichkeit. It is difficult to translate, but Freud's English translator thought that any correct translation would have to link the German word, meaning secrecy or privacy (as in the sense of “hidden”), to the “uncanny.” David Bakan (1958) maintains that it is telling that Freud used the word in his seventieth year to explain his special “Jewish feeling” to the B'nai B'rith Lodge in Vienna which he had joined years earlier. Bakan quotes Freud to suggest that Freud was “coming home” to himself. That is, he was returning to the roots of his self-understanding, and the feeling of doing so was an unusual one. Freud's personal origins lay deep within the culture of the Jewish mystical tradition. Says Freud (1919):
Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops towards an ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of heimlich. (p. 226)
Things were perhaps “hidden,” private and secret, but they also were not so private and not so secret at closer scrutiny. They could be weird and awful, or uncanny (unheimlich). For Freud (1919), “the ‘uncanny’ is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar” (p. 220). It is like returning home after being away a long time and finding that things are as they were when you left even though you yourself have undergone great changes. It all seems weird, so familiar, yet unfamiliar.
I should like in this paper to advance Freud's discussion of the uncanny by citing recent discussions of the psychoanalysis of narcissism and offering an illustration of an updated psychology of the