This contribution presents the mental apparatus, postulated in the metapsychology of Freud and subsequent authors, as governed by the difficult coexistence of conflicting and opposing mental territories and forces that accompany each individual's problematic confrontation with otherness on both an intra-psychic and interpersonal level. This contentiousness can be described in terms of a simultaneous opposition and overlapping of familiarity and alienness. Freud's 1919 essay, “The Uncanny”, identifies the unconscious as the principal locus of this conflictual coexistence.