SUPERNATURAL HORROR Pt. 4: Freud's "Uncanny" (Pt. 3)

So, in my quest to understand supernatural horror, I've begun with Freud's essay, "The Uncanny."

He associates the uncanny very strongly with fear of the supernatural, and argues that the basis for this feeling is the "return of the repressed."

I've already addressed his first argument, in which he tries to draw an analogy between the psychological process he proposes, by which what is familiar becomes uncannily unfamiliar through repression, and the documented evolution of the word heimlich from its original meaning to include an apparently opposite meaning synonymous with unheimlich. The analogy breaks down precisely where he needs it to hold up, on the matter of repression, which plays no part whatsoever in the evolution of the word's meaning, and therefore this argument does not support the conclusion he draws from it.

I've also addressed his second argument, based on his interpretation of E. T. A. Hoffmann's unquestionably uncanny tale, "The Sand-Man." Although he assumes (he never actually argues the point) that the uncanny effect of this story is rooted in "the idea of being robbed of one's eyes," and by implication in the return of the repressed infantile castration complex (this is the point he argues at great length), I contend that the story achieves its sense of the uncanny rather by investing the eponymous figure of the Sand-Man with an overpowering air of supernatural menace. That renders this second argument unsound, but doesn't quite contradict Freud's conclusion, because he ultimately argues that the sense of the uncanny inspired by supernatural menace is also rooted in a return of the repressed.

That brings us to his ultimate argument, where he considers things like belief in the "omnipotence of thoughts" which underlies much superstitious thinking about magic and fate, the evil eye, death (which is almost always overlain by a supernatural interpretation), ghosts, animism, sorcery and secret magical powers, etc. He calls these "undeniable instances of the uncanny," and by that I take him to mean, these are the things that paradigmatically inspire the particularly shuddery type of fear in question.

Against the view that the uncanny feeling inspired by these things is rooted in a "return of the repressed," there are two absolutely devastating objections.

The first is that, although most modern adults have more or less left belief in such notions behind, they have for the most part not done so through repression. Freud himself acknowledges this in his very reluctance to use the term in this context. Instead, he often resorts to the term "surmounted":

But when this stage has been surmounted . . . the quality of uncanniness can only come from the fact of the 'double' being a creation dating back to a very early mental stage, long since surmounted . . . modes of working of the mental apparatus that have been surmounted . . . everything that recalls repressed desires and surmounted modes of thinking belonging to the prehistory of the individual and of the race . . . Nowadays we no longer believe in them, we have surmounted these modes of thought . . .

At one point, he goes so far as to revise his formulation altogether:

It would be more correct to take into account a psychological distinction which can be detected here, and to say that the animistic beliefs of civilized people are in a state of having been (to a greater or lesser extent) surmounted [rather than repressed {bracketed qualification in Strachey's translation}]. Our conclusion could then be stated thus: an uncanny experience occurs either when infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression {I've already discredited the arguments he puts forward for this}, or when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed {which is another matter entirely}.

However Freud tries to paper over this distinction, it is a decisively objectionable fissure in his account of the uncanny.

What really knocks his theory dead, though, is the fact that these things inspire a sense of the uncanny before they have been repressed, surmounted, or whatever. Freud himself (unwittingly?) provides a number of examples. In the King of Egypt's reaction to Polycrates's eerily good fortune, and in Gretchen's reaction to Mephistopholes, we find characters who have not surmounted belief in the supernatural reacting to it with a fear that Freud describes as a feeling of the uncanny, and indeed he puts these forward as paradigm cases. Other "indisputable instances" cited by Freud--the evil eye, reanimated severed body parts, and hostile spirits--provoke the most profound sense of the uncanny precisely in people who have not surmounted belief in such things. He also wrestles unconvincingly with the objection that repression/surmounting can't have anything to do with our sense of the uncanny surrounding death, since the primitive dread of death is something we've never quite succeeded in repressing or surmounting.

These are just some examples brought up by Freud himself. If we consult our own experience, it's pretty plain that a superstitious person regards the object of his superstition as uncanny, not because he's surmounted his superstitious belief, but rather precisely because he hasn't. I daresay most of us have had our most powerful and moving impressions of the uncanny as children--to the point that "childhood fears" could well serve as a synonym. When supernatural horror succeeds in helping modern adults recapture these shuddery feelings, it does so in spite of the fact that we've surmounted belief in monsters and magic; on the contrary, it reactivates the original sense of the uncanny we had before we surmounted such beliefs.

To my mind, these two objections to Freud's account of the uncanny are obvious and conclusive. Nevertheless, I think there's more to be said about his notion of the "return of the repressed." Just because it doesn't explain our sense of the uncanny, that doesn't make it entirely dispensable. I'll examine it more directly, on its own merits, in the next installment.