Freud Uncanny

Freud’s essay, “The Uncanny”, merges aesthetics and psychoanalysis to determine what the uncanny is. He determines that aesthetics usually refers to positive emotions and things of beauty but the uncanny is the opposite. In Freud’s opinion, the uncanny is ‘…that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar…’ (I, 5). This directly contradicts the only other paper that studied the uncanny by Ernst Jentsch which concluded that the uncanny was the fear of the unfamiliar and based on intellectual uncertainty. Freud’s essay aims to demonstrate why the uncanny is fearful, the aesthetics of anxiety. Through his collection of definitions of the word heimlich meaning canny/homely, Freud finds that on one hand can mean familiar and agreeable and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight, explaining that while these definitions are very different, examining them in individual instance will make us understand what uncanniness means. Freud follows with the statement that we are naturally tempted to conclude that what is uncanny frightens
However, when the double is encountered at a later mental stage, it becomes a thing of terror thus invoking the uncanny. He states that the double is not only offensive to the ego but that there are ‘…all the unfulfilled but possible futures to which we still like to cling in phantasy…’ (II, 16) where fantasy marks the return to an infantile psychology overcome and forgotten. Freud develops this idea further by explaining that experiencing the double later in life is experienced as uncanny because it harks back “…to a time when the ego had not yet marked itself off sharply from the external world and from other people.” (II,