Sigmund Freud

 

In this paper, Freud dialogues with contemporary aesthetics about the psychodynamic basis of the frightening, uncanny feeling arising in certain situations, atmospheres, or from some objects or characters.

He stresses the ambivalence of familiar and unfamiliar feelings, intertwined in the same linguistic expressions and, through psychoanalytic insight, shows that uncanniness depends on what unconsciously reminds us of something once we knew but later was repressed.

A sort of sense of extraneousness of what is, in reality, too familiar.

 

psychoanalysis, aesthetics, psychodynamics, Unheimlich, uncanny