THE STANDARD EDITION
OF THE COMPLETE PSYCHOLOGICAL WORKS OF

SIGMUND FREUD

Translated from the German under the General Editorship of
JAMES STRACHEY

* In Collaboration with

ANNA FREUD

Assisted by

ALIX STRACHEY and ALAN TYSON

VOLUME XVII
(1917-1919)

An Infantile Neurosis

and

Other Works

LONDON

THE HOGARTH PRESS
AND THE INSTITUTE OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

DAS UNHEIMLICHE

(a) German Editions:

1919 Imago , 5 (5-6), 297-324.

1922 S.K.S.N., 5, 229-73.

1924 G.S. } 10, 369-408.

1924 Dichtung und Kunst , 99-138.

1947 G. W. } 12, 229-68.

(b) English Translation:

‘The “Uncanny” ’

1925 C.P., 4, 368-407. (Tr. Alix Strachey.)

The present translation is a considerably modified version
of the one published in 1925.

This paper, published in the autumn of 1919, is mentioned
by Freud in a letter to Ferenczi of May 12 of the same year, in
which he says he has dug an old paper out of a drawer and is
re-wnting it. Nothing is known as to when it was originally
written or how much it was changed, though the footnote
quoted from Totem and Taboo on p. 241 below shows that the
subject was present in his mind as early as 1913. The passages
dealing with the ‘compulsion to repeat* (p. 234 ff.) must in any
case have formed part of the revision. They include a summary
of much of the contents of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g)
and speak of it as ‘already completed*. The same letter to
Ferenczi of May 12, 1919, announced that a draft of this latter
work was finished, though it was not in fact published for
another year. Further details will be found in the Editor’s Note
to Beyond the Pleasure Principle , Standard Ed,> 18, 3.

The first section of the present paper, with its lengthy quo-
tation from a German dictionary, raises special difficulties for
the translator. It is to be hoped that readers will not allow
themselves to be discouraged by this preliminary obstacle, for
the paper is full of interesting and important material, and
travels far beyond merely linguistic topics.

THE ‘UNCANNY’

i

It is only rarely that a psycho-analyst feels impelled to in-
vestigate the subject of aesthetics, even when aesthetics is under-
stood to mean not merely the theory of beauty but the theory
of the qualities of feeling. He works in other strata of mental life
and has little to do with the subdued emotional impulses which,
inhibited in their aims and dependent on a host of concurrent
factors, usually furnish the material for the study of aesthetics.
But it does occasionally happen that he has to interest him-
self in some particular province of that subject; and this
province usually proves to be a rather remote one, and
one which has been neglected in the specialist literature of
aesthetics. ’

The subject of the ‘uncanny* 1 is a province of this kind. It is
undoubtedly related to what isjrighterihig— to what arouses
dread and horror; equally certainly, too, the word is not always
used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with
what excites fear in general. Yet we may expect that a special
core of feeling is present which justifies the use of a special con-
ceptual term. One is curious to know what this common core is
which allows us to distinguish as ‘uncanny* certain things which
he within the field of what is frightening.

As good as nothing is to be found upon this subject in com-
prehensive treatises on aesthetics, which in general prefer to
concern themselves with what is beautiful, attractive and
sublime— that is, with feelings of a positive nature — and with
the circumstances and the objects that call them forth, rather
than with the opposite feelings of repulsion and distress. I know
of only one attempt in medico-psychological literature, a fertile
but not exhaustive paper by Jentsch (1906). But I must confess
that I have not made a very thorough examination of the liter-
ature, especially the foreign literature, relating to this present
modest contribution of mine, for reasons which, as may

1 [The German word, translated throughout this paper by the
English ‘uncanny’, is tunheimlich\ literally ‘unhomely’. The English term
is not, of course, an exact equivalent of the German one.]

s.f. xvn — p 219

THE ‘UNCANNY*

220

easily be guessed, lie in the times in which we live; 1 so that
my paper is presented to the reader without any claim to
priority.

In his study of the ‘uncanny* Jentsch quite rightly lays stress
on the obstacle presented by the fact that people vary so very
greatly in their sensitivity to this quality of feeling. The writer
of the present contribution, indeed, must himself plead guilty
to a special obtuseness in the matter, where extreme delicacy
of perception would be more in place. It is long since he has
experienced or heard of anything which has given lnm an
uncanny impression, and he must start by translating himself
into that state of feeling, by awakening in himself the possibility
of experiencing it. Still, such difficulties make themselves power-
fully felt in many other branches of aesthetics; we need not
on that account despair of finding instances in which the
quality in question will be unhesitatingly recognized by most
people.

Two courses are open to us at the outset. Either we can find
out what meaning has come to be attached to the word ‘un-
canny* in the course of its history; or we can collect all those
properties of persons, things, sense-impressions, experiences and
situations which arouse in us the feeling of uncanniness, and
then infer the unknown nature of the uncanny from what all
these examples have in common. I will say at once that both
courses lead to the same result: the uncanny is that class of the
frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long
familiar. How this is possible, in what circumstances the familiar
can become uncanny and frightening, I shall show in what
follows. Let me also add that my investigation was actually
begun by collecting a number of individual cases, and was only
later confirmed by an examination of linguistic usage. In this
discussion, however, I shall follow the reverse course.

'J

4

1

;j

t

The German word * unheimlicK is obviously the opposite of
* heimlicK [‘homely’], ‘heimiscK [‘native’] — the opposite of what
is familiar; and we are tempted to conclude that what is ‘un-
canny’ is frightening precisely because it is not known and
familiar. Naturally not everything that is new and unfamiliar is
frightening, however; the relation is not capable of inversion.

1 [An allusion to the first World War only just concluded.]

THE ‘UNCANNY* 221

We can only say that what is novel can easily become frighten-
ing and uncanny; some new things are frightening but not by
any means all. Sbmething has to be added to what is novel and
unfamiliar in order to make it uncanny.

On the whole, Jentsch did not get beyond this relation of the
uncanny to the novel and unfamiliar. He ascribes the essential
factor in the production of the feeling of uncanniness to intel-
lectual uncertainty; so that the uncanny would always, as it
were, be something one does not know one’s way about in. The
better orientated in his environment a person is, the less readily
will he get the impression of something uncanny in regard to the
objects and events in it.

It is not difficult to see that this definition is incomplete, and
we will therefore try to proceed beyond the equation ‘uncanny’
= ‘unfamiliar’. We will first turn to other languages. But the
dictionaries that we consult tell us nothing new, perhaps only
because we ourselves speak a language that is foreign. Indeed,
we get an impression that many languages are without a word
for this particular shade of what is frightening.

I should like to express my indebtedness to Dr. Theodor Reik
for the following excerpts: —

Latin: (K. E. Georges, Deutschlateinisches Worterbuch , 1898).
An uncanny place: locus suspectus ; at an uncanny time of night:
intempesta nocte.

Greek: (Rost’s and Schenkl’s Lexikons). tjdvog (i.e. strange,
foreign).

English: (from the dictionaries of Lucas, Bellows, Fliigel and
Muret-Sanders). Uncomfortable, uneasy, gloomy, dismal, un-
canny, ghastly; (of a house) haunted; (of a man) a repulsive
fellow.

French: (Sachs- Villatte). Inquietant, sinistre , lugubre , mal d son
aise.

Spanish: (Tollhausen, 1889). Sospechoso, de mal aguero , Mgubre ,
siniestro.

The Italian and Portuguese languages seem to content them-
selves with words which we should describe as circumlocutions.
In Arabic and Hebrew ‘uncanny* means the same as ‘daemonic’,
‘gruesome*.

Let us therefore return to the German language. In Daniel
Sanders’s Worterbuch der Deutschen Sprache (1860, 1, 729), the
following entry, which I here reproduce in full, is to be found

222

THE ‘UNCANNY*

under the word * heimlich' . I have laid stress on one or two
passages by italicizing them. 1

Heimlich , adj., subst. Heimlichkeit (pi. Heimlichkeiten ): I. Also
heimelich, heimelig , belonging to the house, not strange, familiar,
tame, intimate, friendly, etc.

(a) (Obsolete) belonging to the house or the family, or re-
garded as so belonging (cf. Latin familiaris , familiar): Die
Heimlichen, the members of the household; Der heimliche Rat
(Gen. xli, 45; 2 Sam. xxiii. 23; 1 Chron. xii. 25; Wisd. viii. 4),
now more usually Gekeimer Rat [Privy Councillor],

( b ) Of animals: tame, companionable to man. As opposed to
wild, e.g. ‘Animals which are neither wild nor heimlich ’, etc.
‘Wild animals . . . that are trained to be heimlich and accus-
tomed to men.’ ‘If these young creatures are brought up from
early days among men they become quite heimlich, friendly’ etc.
— So also: ‘It (the lamb) is so heimlich and eats out of my hand.’
‘Nevertheless, the stork is a beautiful, heimelich bird.’

(c) Intimate, friendlily comfortable; the enjoyment of quiet
content, etc., arousing a sense of agreeable restfulness and
security as in one within the four walls of his house. 2 ‘Is it still
heimlich to you in your country where strangers are felling your
woods?’ ‘She did not feel too heimlich with him.* ‘Along a high,
heimlich, shady path . . ., beside a purling, gushing and babbling
woodland brook.’ ‘To destroy the Heimlichkeit of the home.’ ‘I
could not readily find another spot so intimate and heimlich as
this.’ ‘We pictured it so comfortable, so nice, so cosy and heim-
lich .’ ‘In quiet Heimlichkeit, surrounded by close walis.* ‘A care-
ful housewife, who knows how to 'make a pleasing Heimlichkeit
(- Hauslichkeit [domesticity]) out of the smallest means.’ ‘The
man who till recently had been so strange to him now seemed
to him all the more heimlich .’ ‘The protestant land-owners do
not feel . . . heimlich among their catholic inferiors.* ‘When it
grows heimlich and still, and the evening quiet alone watches

1 [In the translation which follows in the text above, a few details,
mainly giving the sources of the quotations, have been omitted. For
purposes of reference, we reprint in an Appendix the entire extract from
Sanders’s Dictionary exactly as it is given in German in Freud’s original
paper except that a few minor misprints have been put right. (Cf.
p.253.)] '

[It may be remarked that the English ‘canny*, in addition to its
more usual meaning of ‘shrewd’, can mean ‘pleasant’, ‘cosy’.]

THE ‘UNCANNY* 223

over your cell.* ‘Quiet, lovely and heimlich, no place more fitted
for their rest.* ‘He did not feel at all heimlich about it.*— Also,
[in compounds] ‘The place was so peaceful, so lonely, so
shadily-fozm&VA. ’ ‘The in- and outflowing waves of the current,
dreamy and \vS\zby-heimlich.' Cf. in especial Unheimlich [see
below]. Among Swabian Swiss authors in especial, often as a
trisyllable: ‘How heimelich it seemed to Ivo again of an evening,
when he was at home.’ ‘It was so heimelig in the house.’ ‘The
warm room and the heimelig afternoon.* ‘When a man feels in
his heart that he is so small and the Lord so great — that is what
is truly heimelig.' ‘Little by little they grew at ease and heimelig
among themselves.’ ‘Friendly Heimeligkeit .* ‘I shall be nowhere
more heimelich than I am here.’ ‘That which comes from afar
. . . assuredly does not live quite heimelig (heimatlich. [at home],
freundnachbarlich [in a neighbourly way]) among the people.*-
‘The cottage where he had once sat so often among his own
people, so heimelig, so happy.* ‘The sentinel’s horn sounds so
heimelig from the tower, and his voice invites so hospitably.*
‘You go to sleep there so soft and warm, so wonderfully heim'lig .*
— This form of the word deserves to become general in order to protect
this perfectly good sense of the word from becoming obsolete through an
easy confusion with II [see below]. Cf: ‘ “The £ecks [a family
name] are all ‘heimlich'” (in sense II) “ ‘Heimlich'? . . . What do
you understand by ‘heimlich'?” “Well , . . . they are like a buried spring
or a dried-up pond. One cannot walk over it without always having the
feeling that water might come up there again” “Oh, we call it ‘unheim-
lich'; you call it ‘heimlich'. Well, what makes you think that there is
something secret and untrustworthy about this family?” * (Gutzkow).

{d) Especially in Silesia: gay, cheerful; also of the weather.

II. Concealed, kept from sight, so that others do not get to
know of or about it, withheld from others. To do something
heimlich, i.e. behind someone’s back; to steal away heimlich;
heimlich meetings and appointments; to look on with heimlich
pleasure at someone’s discomfiture; to sigh or weep heimlich; to
behave heimlich , as though there was something to conceal;
heimlich love-affair, love, sin; heimlich places (which good man-
ners oblige us to conceal) (1 Sam. v. 6). ‘The heimlich chamber’
(privy) (2 Kings x. 27.). Also, ‘the heimlich chair*. ‘To throw
into pits or Heimlichkeiten'. — ‘Led the steeds heimlich before
Laomedon.’ — ‘As secretive, heimlich, deceitful and malicious
towards cruel masters ... as frank, open, sympathetic and

224

THE ‘UNCANNY*

helpful towards a friend in misfortune.* ‘You have still to learn
what is heimlich holiest to me.* ‘The heimlich art’ (magic). ‘Where
public ventilation has to stop, there heimlich machinations
begin.* ‘Freedom is the whispered watchword of heimlich con-
spirators and the loud battle-cry of professed revolutionaries.*
‘A holy, heimlich effect.’ ‘I have roots that are most heimlich. I
am grown in the deep earth.* ‘My heimlich pranks.’ ‘If he is not
given it openly and scrupulously he may seize it heimlich and
unscrupulously.* ‘He had achromatic telescopes constructed
heimlich and secretly.* ‘Henceforth I desire that there should be
nothing heimlich any longer between us.’ — To discover, disclose,
betray someone’s Heimlichkeiten; ‘to concoct Heimlichkeiten be-
hind my back*. ‘In my time we studied Heimlichkeit .’ ‘The hand
of understanding can alone undo the powerless spell of the
Heimlichkeit (of hidden gold).* ‘Say, where is the place of con-
cealment ... in what place of hidden Heimlichkeit ?' ‘Bees, who
make the lock of Heimlichkeiten ' (i.e. sealing-wax). ‘Learned in
strange Heimlichkeiten * (magic arts).

t For compounds see above, I c. Note especially the negative
W: eerie, weird, arousing gruesome fear: ‘Seeming quite
unheimlich and ghostly to him.’ ‘The unheimlich y fearful hours of
night. I had already long since felt an unheimlich , even gruesome
feeling.’ ‘Now I am beginning to have an unheimlich feeling.*
. . . ‘Feels an unheimlich horror.’ * Unheimlich and motionless like
a stone image.’ ‘The unheimlich mist called hill-fog.’ ‘These pale
youths are unheimlich and are brewing heaven knows what mis-
chief. Unheimlich ' is the name for everything that ought to have
remained . . . secret and hidden but has come to light ' (Schelling).—
To veil the divine, to surround it with a certain Uhheimlichkeit .*

Unheimlich is not often used as opposite to meaning II
(above). *

What interests us most in this long extract is to find that
among its different shades of meaning the word ‘ heimlich ’ ex-
hibits one which is identical with its opposite, ‘ unheimlich ’. What
is heimlich thus comes to be unheimlich. (Gf. the quotation from
Gutzkow: ‘We call it “ unheimlich you call it “ heimlich ”.*) In
general we are reminded that the word 'heimlich' is not unam-
biguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which, without being
contradictory, are yet very different: on the one hand it means
what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is con-

225

THE . ‘UNCANNY*

cealed and kept out of sight. 1 ‘ Unheimlich ’ is customarily used, we
are told, as the contrary only of the first signification of 'heim-
lich' t and not of the second. Sanders tells us nothing concerning
a possible genetic connection between these two meanings of
heimlich. On the other hand, we notice that Schelling says some-
thing which throws quite a new light on the concept of the
Unheimlich , for which we were certainly not prepared. Accord-
ing to him, everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained
secret and hidden but has come to light.

Some of the doubts that have thus arisen are removed if we
consult Grimm’s dictionary. (1877, 4, Part 2, 873 ff.)

We read:

Heimlich ; adj. and adv. vemaculus , occultus; MHG. heimelich,
heimlich.

(P. 874.) In a slightly different sense: *1 feel heimlich s well,
free from fear.* . . .

[3] ( b ) Heimlich is also used of a place free from ghostly in-
fluences . . . familiar, friendly, intimate.

(P. 875: /?) Familiar, amicable, unreserved.

4. From the idea of 'homelike ' , ‘ belonging to the house ' , the further
idea is developed of something withdrawn from the eyes of strangers ,
something concealed , secret / and this idea is expanded in many
ways ...

(P. 876.) ‘On the left bank of the lake there lies a meadow
heimlich in the wood.’ (Schiller, Wilhelm Tell , I. 4.). . . Poetic
licence, rarely so used in modem speech . . . Heimlich is used in
conjunction with a verb expressing the act of concealing: ‘In
the secret of his tabernacle he shall hide me heimlich .’ (Ps. xxvii.
5.) . . . Heimlich parts of the human body, pudenda . . . ‘the men
that died not were smitten on their heimlich parts.’ (1 Samuel
v. 12.) ...

(*) Officials who give important advice which has to be kept
secret in matters of state are called heimlich councillors; the
adjective, according to modem usage, has been replaced by
geheim [secret] . . . ‘Pharaoh called Joseph’s name “him to
whom secrets are revealed” ’ {heimlich councillor). (Gen. xli.
45.)

1 [According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a similar ambiguity
attaches to the English ‘canny*, which may mean not only ‘cosy’ but
also ‘endowed with occult or magical powers’-]

226 THE ‘UNCANNY*

(P. 878.) 6. Heimlich , as used of knowledge — mystic, alle-
gorical: a heimlick meaning, mysticus , divinus , occultus, Jiguratus.

(P. 878.) Heimlich in a different sense, as withdrawn from
knowledge, unconscious . . . Heimlich also has the meaning of
that which is obscure, inaccessible to knowledge . . . ‘Do you
not see? They do not trust us; they fear the hdmlich face of the
Duke of Friedland.* (Schiller, Wallensteins Lager , Scene 2.)

9. The notion of something hidden and dangerous , which is expressed
in the last paragraph, is still further developed , so that ‘ heimlich? comes
to have the meaning usually ascribed to ‘unheimlich? . Thus: ‘At times
I feel like a man who walks in the night and believes in ghosts;
every comer is heimlich and full of terrors for him’. (Klinger,
Theater , 3. 298.)

Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the
direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its oppo-
site, unheimlich. Unkeimlich is in some way dr other a sub-species
of heimlich . Let us bear this discovery in mind, though we can-
not yet rightly understand it, alongside of Schelling’s 1 definition
of the Unheimlich. If we go on to examine individual instances
of uncanniness, these hints will become intelligible to us.

II

When we proceed to review the things, persons, impressions,
events and situations which are able to arouse in us a feeling of
the uncanny in a particularly forcible and definite form, the
first requirement is obviously to select a suitable example to
start on. Jentsch has taken as a very good instance ‘doubts
whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or con-
versely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate*;
and he refers in this connection to the impression made by wax-
work figures, ingeniously constructed dolls and automata. To
these he adds the uncanny effect of epileptic fits, and of mani-
festations of insanity, because these excite in the spectator the
impression of automatic, mechanical processes at work behind
the ordinary appearance of mental activity. Without entirely
accepting this author’s view, we will take it as a starting-point
for our own investigation because in what follows he reminds us

f _ 1 P? toe original version of the paper (1919) only, the nam *
Schleiermacher’ was primed here, evidently in error.]

THE ‘UNCANNY* 227

of a writer who has succeeded in producing uncanny effects
better than anyone else.

Jentsch writes: ‘In telling a story, one of the most successful
devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader
in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a
human being or an automaton, and to do it in such a way that
his attention is not focused directly upon his uncer tain ty, so
that he may not be led to go into the matter and clear it up
immediately. That, as we have said, would quickly dissipate the
peculiar emotional effect of the thing. E. T. A. Hoffmann has
repeatedly employed this psychological artifice with success in
his fantastic narratives.*

This observation, undoubtedly a correct one, refers primarily
to tiie story of ‘The Sand-Man’ in Hoffmann’s Nachtstiicken , J
which contains the original of Olympia, the doll that appears
in the first act of Offenbach’s opera, Tales of Hoffmann. But I
cannot think — and I hope most readers of the story will agree
with me — that the theme of the doll Olympia, who is to all
appearances a living being, is by any means the only, or indeed
the most important, element that must be held responsible for
the quite unparalleled atmosphere of uncanniness evoked by
the story. Nor is this atmosphere heightened by the fact that the
author himself treats the episode of Olympia with a faint touch
of satire and uses it to poke fun at the young man’s idealization
of his mistress. The main theme of the story is, on the contrary,
something different, something which gives it its name, and
which is always re-introduced at critical moments: it is the
theme of the ‘Sand- Man’ who tears out children’s eyes.

This fantastic tale opens with the childhood recollections of
the student Nathaniel. In spite of his present happiness, he
cannot banish the memories associated with the mysterious an d
terri fying death of his b eloved father. On certaineve nln gs TTis
mother usecTto send the children to bed early, warning them
that the Sand- Man was coming’; and, sure enough, Nathaniel
would not fail to hear the heavy tread of a visitor, with whom
his father would then be occupied for the evening. When
questioned about the Sand- Man, his mother, it is true, denied

t 1 Hoff m a nn ’s Samiliche Werke, Grisebach Edition, 3. [A translation of
The Sand-Man is included in Eight Tales of Hoffmann , translated by
J. M. Cohen, London, Pan Books, 1952.]

228 THE ‘UNCANNY*

that such a person existed except as a figure of speech; but his
nurse could give him more definite information: ‘He’s a wicked
man who comes when children won’t go to bed, and throws
handfuls of sand in their eyes so that they jump out of their
heads all bleeding. Then he puts the eyes in a sack and carries
them off to the half-moon to feed his children. They sit up
there in their nest, and their beaks are hooked like owls’ beaks,
and they use them to peck up naughty boys’ and girls’ eyes with.’

Although little Nathaniel was sensible and old enough not to
credit the figure of the Sand-Man with such gruesome attri-
butes, yet the dread of him became fixed in his heart. He deter-
mined to find out what the Sand-Man looked like; and one
evening, when the Sand-Man was expected again, he hid in his
father’s study. He recognized the visitor as the lawyer Coppelius,
a repulsive person whom the children were frightened of when
he occasionally came to a meal; and he now identified this
Coppelius with the dreaded Sand- Man. As regards the rest of
the scene, Hoffmann already leaves us in doubt whether what
we are witnessing is the first delirium of the panic-stricken boy,
or a succession of events which are to be regarded in the story as
being real. His father and the guest are at work at a brazier
with glowing flames. The little eavesdropper hears Coppelius
call out: ‘Eyes here! Eyes here!’ and betrays himself by scream-
ing aloud. Coppelius seizes him and is on the point of dropping
bits of red-hot coal from the fire into his eyes, and then of throw-
ing them into the brazier, but his father begs him off and saves
his eyes. After this the boy falls into a deep swoon; and a long
illness brings his experience to an end. Those who decide in
favour of the rationalistic interpretation of the Sand- Man will
not fail to recognize in the child’s phantasy the persisting influ-
ence of his nurse’s story. The bits of sand that are to be thrown
into the child’s eyes turn into bits of red-hot coal from the
flames; and in both cases they are intended to make his eyes
jump out. In the course of another visit of the Sand-Man’s, a
year later, his father is killed in his study by an explosion. The
lawyer Coppelius disappears from the place without leaving a
trace behind.

Nathaniel, now a student, believes that he has recognized this
phantom of horror from his childhood in an itinerant optician,
an Italian called Giuseppe Coppola, who at his university
town, offers him weather-glasses for sale. When Nathanile

THE ‘UNCANNY* 229

refuses, the man goes on: ‘Not weather-glasses? not weather-
glasses? also got fine eyes, fine eyes!’ The student’s terror is
allayed when he finds that the proffered eyes are only harmless
spectacles, and he buys a pocket spy-glass from Coppola. With
its aid he looks across into Professor Spalanzani’s house opposite
and there spies Spalanzani’s beautiful, but strangely silent
and motionless daughter, Olympia. He soon falls in love with
her so violently that, because of her, he quite forgets the clever
and sensible girl to whom he is betrothed. But Olympia is an
automaton whose clock-work has been made by Spalanzani,
and whose eyes have been put in by Coppola, the Sand-Man.
The student surprises the two Masters quarrelling over their
handiwork. The optician carries off the wooden eyeless doll;
and the mechanician, Spalanzani, picks up Olympia’s bleeding
eyes from the ground and throws them at Nathaniel’s breast,
saying that Coppola had stolen them from the student.
Nathaniel succumbs to a fresh attack of madness, and in his
delirium his recollection of his father’s death is mingled with
this new experience. ‘Hurry up! hurry up! ring of fire!* he cries.
‘Spin about, ring of fire — Hurrah! Hurry up, wooden doll!
lovely wooden doll, spin about — .* He then falls upon the
professor, Olympia’s ‘father’, and tries to strangle him.

Rallying from a long and serious illness, Nathaniel seems at
last to have recovered. He intends to marry his betrothed, with
whom he has become reconciled. One day he and she are walk-
ing through the city market-place, over which the high tower of
the Town Hall throws its huge shadow. On the girl’s suggestion,
they climb the tower, leaving her brother, who is walking with
them, down below. From the top, Clara’s attention is drawn to
a curious object moving along the street. Nathaniel looks at this
thing through Coppola’s spy-glass, which he finds in his pocket,
and falls into a new attack of madness. Shouting ‘Spin about,
wooden doll!’ he tries to throw the girl into the gulf below. Her
brother, brought to her side by her cries, rescues her and hastens
down with her to safety. On the tower above, the madman
rushes round, shrieking ‘Ring of fire, spin about!’ — and we
know the origin of the words. Among the people who begin to
gather below there comes forward the figure of the lawyer
Coppelius, who has suddenly returned. We may suppose that it
was his approach, seen through the spy-glass, which threw
Nathaniel into his fit of madness. As the onlookers prepare to go

230 THE ‘UNCANNY*

up and overpower the madman, Coppelius laughs and says:
‘Wait a bit; he’ll come down of himself.’ Nathaniel suddenly
stands still, catches sight of Coppelius, and with a wild shriek
‘Yes! “Fine eyes — fine eyes”!’ flings himself over the parapet.
While he lies on the paving-stones with a shattered skull the
Sand-Man vanishes in the throng.

This short summary leaves no doubt, I think, that the feeling
of something uncanny is directly attached to the figure of the
Sand- Man, that is, to the idea of being robbed of one’s eyes,
and that Jentsch’s point of an intellectual uncertainty has
nothing to do with the effect. Uncertainty whether an object
is living or inanimate, which admittedly applied to the doll
Olympia, is quite irrelevant in connection with this other, more
striking instance of uncanniness. It is true that the writer creates
a kind of uncertainty in us in the beginning by not letting us
know, no doubt purposely, whether he is taking us into the real
world or into a purely fantastic one of his own creation. He has,
of course, a right to do either; and if he chooses to stage his action
in a world peopled with spirits, demons and ghosts, as Shake-
speare does in Hamlet , in Macbeth and, in a different sense, in
The Tempest and A Midsummer-Night's Dream } we must bow to
his decision and treat his setting as though it were real for as
long as we put ourselves into his hands. But this uncertainty dis-
appears in the course of Hoffmann’s story, and we perceive that
he intends to make us, too, look through the demon optician’s
spectacles or spy-glass — perhaps, indeed, that the author in his
very own person once peered through such an instrument. For
the conclusion of the story makes it quite clear that Coppola the
optician really is the lawyer Coppelius 1 and also, therefore, the
Sand-Man.

There is no question therefore, of any intellectual uncertainty
here: we know now that we are not supposed to be looking on
at the products of a madman’s imagination, behind which we,
with the superiority of rational minds, are able to detect the
sober truth; and yet this knowledge does not lessen the im-
pression of uncanniness in the least degree. The theory of

1 Frau Dr. Rank has pointed out the association of the name with
'coppella * = crucible, connecting it with the chemical operations that
caused the father’s death; and also with i coppo > — eye-socket. [Except
in the first (1919) edition this footnote was attached, it seems erroneously,
to the first occurrence of the name Coppelius on this page.]

THE ‘UNCANNY* 231

intellectual uncertainty is thus incapable of explaining that
impression.

We know from psycho-analytic experience, however, that
the fear of damaging or losing one’s eyes is a terrible one in
children. Many adults retain their apprehensiveness in this
respect, and no physical injury is so much dreaded by them as
an injury to the eye. We are accustomed to say, too, that we
will treasure a thing as the apple of our eye. A study of dreams,
phantasies and myths has taught us that anxiety about one’s
eyes, the fear of going blind, is often enough a substitute for the
dread of being castrated. The self-blinding of the mythical
criminal, Oedipus, was simply a mitigated form of the punish-
ment of castration — the only punishment that was adequate for
him by the lex talionis. We may try on rationalistic grounds to
deny that fears about the eye are derived from the fear of
castration, and may argue that it is very natural that so precious
an organ as the eye should be guarded by a proportionate
dread. Indeed, we might go further and say that the fear of
castration itself contains no other significance and no deeper
secret than a justifiable dread of this rational kind. But this
view does not account adequately for the substitutive relation
between the eye and the male organ which is seen to exist in
dreams and myths and phantasies; nor can it dispel the im-
pression that the threat of being castrated in especial excites a
peculiarly violent and obscure emotion, and that this emotion
is what first gives the idea of losing other organs its intense
colouring. All further doubts are removed when we learn the
details of their ‘castration complex’ from the analysis of neurotic
patients, and realize its immense importance in their mental
life.

Moreover, I would not recommend any opponent of the
psycho-analytic view to select this particular story of the Sand-
Man with which to support his argument that anxiety about
the eyes has nothing to do with the castration complex. For
why does Hoffmann bring the anxiety about eyes into such inti-
mate connection with the father’s death? And why does the
Sand-Man always appear as a disturber of love? He separates
the unfortunate Nathaniel from his betrothed and from her
brother, his best ftiend; he destroys the second object of his
love, Olympia, the lovely doll; and he drives him into suicide
at the moment when he has won back his Clara and is about to

t

232

THE ‘UNCANNY*

THE ‘UNCANNY*

233

be happily united to her. Elements in the story like these, and
many others, seem arbitrary and meaningless so long as we deny
all connection between fears about the eye and castration; but
they become intelligible as soon as we replace the Sand-Man
by the dreaded father at whose hands castration is expected . 1

1 In fact, Hoffmann’s imaginative treatment of his material has not
made such wild confusion of its elements that we cannot reconstruct
their original arrangement. In the story of Nathaniel’s childhood, the
figures of his father and Coppelius represent the two opposites into
which the father-imago is split by his ambivalence; whereas the one
threatens to blind him — that is, to castrate him — , the other, the ‘good*
father, intercedes for his sight. The part of the complex which is most
strongly repressed, the death-wish against the ‘bad’ father, fin ds
expression in the death of the ‘good’ father, and Coppelius is made
answerable for it. This pair of fathers is represented later, in his student
days, by Professor Spalanzani and Coppola the optician. The Professor
is in himself a member of the father-series, and Coppola is reco gniz ed
as identical with Coppelius the lawyer. Just as they used before to work
together over the secret brazier, so now they have jointly created the doll
Olympia; the Professor is even called the father of Olympia. This double
occurrence of activity in common betrays them as divisions of the father-
imago: both the mechanician and the optician were the father of
Nathaniel (and of Olympia as well). In the frightening scene in child-
hood, Coppelius, after sparing Nathaniel’s eyes, had screwed off his
arms and legs as an experiment; that is, he had worked on him as a
mechanician would on a doll. This singular feature, which seems quite
outside the picture of the Sand-Man, introduces a new castration
equivalent; but it also points to the inner identity of Coppelius with his
later counterpart, Spalanzani the mechanician, and prepares us for the
interpretation of Olympia. This automatic doll can be nothing else than
a materialization of Nathaniel’s feminine attitude towards his father in
his infancy. Her fathers, Spalanzani and Coppola, are, after all, nothing
but new editions, reincarnations of Nathaniel’s pair of fathers. Spalan-
zani’s otherwise incomprehensible statement that the optician has stolen
Nathaniel’s eyes (see above, [p. 229]), so as to set them in the doll, now
becomes significant as supplying evidence of the identity of Olympia and
Nathaniel. Olympia is, as it were, a dissociated complex of Nathaniel’s
which confronts him as a person, and Nathaniel’s enslavement to this
complex is expressed in his senseless obsessive love for Olympia. We
may with justice call love of this kind narcissistic, and we ran under-
stand why someone who has fallen victim to it should r elinquish the
real, external object of his love. The psychological truth of the situation
in which the young man, fixated upon his father by his castration com-
plex, becomes incapable of loving a woman, is amply proved by
numerous analyses of patients whose story, though less fantastic, is
hardly less tragic than that of the student Nathaniel.

Hof fmann was the child of an unhappy marriage. When he was

We shall venture, therefore, to refer the uncanny effect of the
Sand- Man to the anxiety belonging to the castration complex of
childhood. But having reached the idea that we can make an
infantile factor such as this responsible for feelings of uncanni-
ness, we are encouraged to see whether we can apply it to other
instances of the uncanny. We find in the story of the Sand- Man
the other theme on which Jentsch lays stress, of a doll which
appears to be alive. Jentsch believes that a particularly favour-
able condition for awakening uncanny feelings is created when
there is intellectual uncertainty whether an object is alive or
not, and when an inanimate object becomes too much like an
animate one. Now, dolls are of course rather closely connected
with childhood life. We remember that in their early games
children do not distinguish at all sharply between living and
inanimate objects, and that they are especially fond of treating
their dolls like live people. In fact, I have occasionally heard a
woman patient declare that even at the age of eight she had still
been convinced that her dolls would be certain to come to life
if she were to look at them in a particular, extremely concen-
trated, way. So that here, too, it is not difficult to discover a
factor from childhood. But, curiously enough, while the Sand-
Man story deals with the arousing of an early childhood fear,
the idea of a ‘living doll’ excites no fear at all; children have no
fear of their dolls coming to life, they may even desire it. The
source of uncanny feelings would not, therefore, be an infantile
fear in this case, but rather an infantile wish or even merely an
infantile belief. There seems to be a contradiction here; but
perhaps it- is only a complication, which may be helpful to us
later on.

Hoffmann is the unrivalled master of the uncanny in liter-
ature. His novel, Die Elixire des Teufels [Tke Devil's Elixir ], con-
tains a whole mass of themes to which one is tempted to ascribe
the uncanny effect of the narrative ; 1 but it is too obscure and

three years old, his father left his small family, and was never united to
them again. According to Grisebach, in his biographical introduction to
Ho ffm a nn ’s works, the writer’s relation to his father was always a most
sensitive subject with him.

1 [Under the rubric ‘Varia’ in one of the issues of the Internationale
Zeitschriftfur Psychoanalyse for 1919 (5, 308), the year in which the present
paper was first published, there appears over the initials ‘S.F.* a short
note which it is not unreasonable to attribute to Freud. Its insertion

234

THE ‘UNCANNY*

intricate a story for ns to venture upon a summary of it. To-
wards the end of the book the reader is told the facts, hitherto
concealed from him, from which the action springs; with the
result, not that he is at last enlightened, but that he falls into a
state of complete bewilderment. The author has piled up too
much material of the same kind. In consequence one’s grasp of
the story as a whole suffers, though not the impression it makes.
We must content ourselves with selecting those themes of un-
canniness which are most prominent, and with seeing whether
they too can fairly be traced back to infantile sources. These
themes are all concerned with the phenomenon of the ‘double’,
which appears in every shape and in every degree of develop-
ment. Thus we have characters who are to be considered
identical because they look alike. This relation is accentuated
by mental processes leaping from one of these characters to
another — by what we should call telepathy — , so that the one
possesses knowledge, feelings and experience in common with
the other. Or it is marked by the fact that the subject identifies
himself with someone else, so that he is in doubt as to which his
self is, or substitutes the extraneous self for his own. In other
words, there is a doubling, dividing and interchanging of the
self. And finally there is the constant recurrence of the same
thing 1 — the repetition of the same features or character-traits
or vicissitudes, of the same crimes, or even the same names
through several consecutive generations.

The theme of the ‘double’ has been very thoroughly treated
by Otto Rank (1914). He has gone into the connections which

here, though strictly speaking irrelevant, may perhaps be excused. The
note is headed: ‘E. T. A. Hoffmann on the Function of Consciousness*
and it proceeds: ‘In Die Elixire des Teufeb (Part II, p. 210, in Hesse’s
edition) — a novel rich in masterly descriptions of pathological mental
states— -Schonfeld comforts the hero, whose consciousness is temporarily
disturbed, with the following words: “And what do you get out of it?
I mean out of the particular mental function which we call conscious-
ness, and which is nothing but the confounded activity of a damned
toll-collector — excise-man — deputy-chief customs officer, who has set up
his infamous bureau in our top storey and who exclaims, whenever any
goods try to get out: ‘HI! hi! exports are prohibited . . . they must stay
here . . . here, in this country.

1 [This phrase seems to be an echo from Nietzsche (e.g. from the last
part of Also Sprach Z dratkustra ). In Chapter III of Beyond the Pleasure
Principle (1920 g), Standard Ed., 18, 22, Freud puts a similar phrase ‘the
perpetual recurrence of the same thing’ into inverted commas.]

THE ‘UNCANNY*

235

the ‘double* has with reflections in mirrors, with shadows, with
guardian spirits, with the belief in the soul and with the fear of
death; but he also lets in a flood of light on the surprising evo-
lution of the idea. For the ‘double’ was originally an insurance
against the destruction of the ego, an ‘energetic denial of the
power of death’, as Rank says; and probably the ‘immortal*
soul was the first ‘double’ of the body. This invention of doubling
as a preservation against extinction has its counterpart in the
language of dreams, which is fond of representing castration by
a doubling or multiplication of a genital symbol. 1 The same
desire led the Ancient Egyptians to develop the art of making
images of the dead in lasting materials. Such ideas, however,
have sprung from the soil of unbounded self-love, from the
primary narcissism which dominates the mind of the child and
of primitive man. But when this stage has been surmounted,
the ‘double’ reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance
of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death. -
The idea of the ‘double’ does not necessarily disappear with
the passing of primary narcissism, for it can receive fresh mean-
ing from the later stages of the ego’s development A special
agency is slowly formed there, which is able to stand over
against the rest of the ego, which has the function of observing
and criticizing the self and of exercising a censorship within the
mind, and which we become aware of as our ‘conscience’. In the
pathological case of delusions of being watched, this mental
agency becomes isolated, dissociated from the ego, and dis-
cernible to the physician’s eye. The fact that an agency of this
kind exists* which is able to treat the rest of the ego like an
object the fact, that is, that man is capable of self-observation
—renders it possible to invest the old idea of a ‘double’ with a
new meaning and to ascribe a number of things to it — above
all, those things which seem to self-criticism to belong to the
old surmounted narcissism of earliest times. 2

1 [Cf. The Interpretation of Dreams , Standard Ed., 5, 357.]

2 1 believe that when poets complain that two souls dwell in the
uman breast, and when popular psychologists talk of the splitting of
people s egos, what they are thinking of is this division (in the sphere of
ego-psychology) between the critical agency and the rest of the ego, and
not the antithesis discovered by psycho-analysis between the ego and
what is unconscious and repressed. It is true that the distinction between
these two antitheses is to some extent effaced by the circumstance that
toremost among the things that are rejected by the criticism of the ego

S.F.XVH — £>

236

THE ‘UNCANNY’

But it is not only tins latter material, offensive as it is to the
criticism of the ego, which may be incorporated in the idea of a
double. There are also all the unfulfilled but possible futures to
which we still like to cling in phantasy, all the strivings of the
ego which adverse external circumstances have crushed, and all
our suppressed acts of volition which nourish in us the illusion
of Free Will. 1 [Cf. Freud, 19016, Chapter XII (B).]

But after having thus considered the manifest motivation of
the figure of a ‘double’, we have to admit that none of this helps
us to understand the extraordinarily strong feeling of some-
thing uncanny that pervades the conception; and our know-
ledge of pathological mental processes enables us to add that
nothing in this more superficial material could account for the
urge towards defence which has caused the ego to project that
material outward as something foreign to itself: When all is
said and done, 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 — a stage, incident-
ally, at which it wore a more friendly aspect. The ‘double’ has
become a thing of terror, just as, after the collapse of their
religion, the gods turned into demons. 5 *

The other forms of ego-disturbance exploited by Hoffmann
can easily be estimated along the same lines as the theme of the
‘double’. They are a harking-back to particular phases in the
evolution of the self-regarding feeling, a regression to a time
when the ego had not yet marked itself off sharply from the
external world and from other people. I believe that these
factors are partly responsible for the impression of uncanniness,
although it is not easy to isolate and determine exactly their
share of it.

The factor of the repetition of the same thing will perhaps
not appeal to everyone as a source of uncanny feeling. From

are derivatives of the repressed. — [Freud had already discussed this
critical agency at length in Section III of his paper on nar cissism (1914c),
and is was soon to be further expanded into the ‘ego-ideal’ and ‘super-
ego’ in Chapter XI of his Group Psychology (1921c) and Chapter III of
The Ego and the Id (19236) respectively.]

1 In Ewers’s Der Student von Prog, which serves as the starting-point of
Rank’s study op the ‘double’, the hero has promised his beloved not to
kill his antagonist in a duel. But on his way to the duelling-ground he
meets his ‘double’, who has already killed his rival.
a Heine, Die Goiter irn Exit.

THE ‘UNCANNY* 237

what I have observed, this phenomenon does undoubtedly,
subject to certain conditions and combined with certain cir-
cumstances, arouse an uncanny feeling, which, furthermore,
recalls the sense of helplessness experienced in some dream-
states. As I was walking, one hot summer afternoon, through
the deserted streets of a provincial town in Italy which was
unknown to me, I found myself in a quarter of whose character
I could not long remain in doubt. Nothing but painted women
were to be seen at the windows of the small houses, and I hast-
ened to leave the narrow street at the next turning. But after
having wandered about for a time without enquiring my way,
I suddenly found myself back in the same street, where my
presence was now beginning to excite attention. I hurried away
once more, only to arrive by another ditour at the same place
yet a third time. Now, however, a feeling overcame me which I
can only describe as uncanny, and I was glad enough to find
myself back at the piazza I had left a short while before, with-
out any further voyages of discovery. Other situations which
have in common with my adventure an unintended recurrence
of the same situation, but which differ radically from it in other
respects, also result in the same feeling of helplessness and of
uncannmess. So, for instance, when, caught in a mist perhaps,
one has lost one’s way in a mountain forest, every attempt to
find the marked or familiar path may bring one back again and
again to one and the same spot, which one can identify by some
particular landmark. Or one may wander about in a dark,
strange room, looking for the door or the electric switch, and
collide time after time with the same piece of furniture — though
it is true that Mark Twain succeeded by wild exaggeration in
turning this latter situation into something irresistibly comic. 1

If we take another class of things, it is easy to see that there,
too, it is only this factor of involuntary repetition which sur-
rounds what would otherwise be innocent enough with an
uncanny atmosphere, and forces upon us the idea of something
fateful and inescapable when otherwise we should have spoken
only of chance’. For instance, we naturally attach no import-
ance to the event when we hand in an overcoat and get a cloak-
room ticket with the number, let us say, 62; or when we find
that our cabin on a ship bears that number. But the impression
is altered if two such events, each in itself indifferent, happen
1 [Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad , London, 1880, 1, 107.]

238

THE ‘UNCANNY"

THE ‘UNCANNY*

239

close together — if we come- across the number 62 several times
in a single day, or if we begin to notice that everything which
has a number — addresses, hotel rooms, compartments in rail-
way trains — invariably has the same one, or at all events one
which contains the same figures. We do feel this to be uncanny.
And unless a man is utterly hardened and proof against the lure
of superstition, he will be tempted to ascribe a secret meaning to
this obstinate recurrence of a number; he will take it, perhaps,
as an indication of the span of life allotted to him. 1 Or suppose
one is engaged in reading the works of the famous physiologist,
Hering, and within the space of a few days receives two letters
from two different countries, each from a person called Hering,
though one has never before had any dealings with anyone of
that name. Not long ago an ingenious scientist (Kammerer,
1919) attempted to reduce coincidences of this kind to certain
laws, and so deprive them of their uncanny effect. I will not
venture to decide whether he has succeeded or not.

How exactly we can trace back to infantile psychology the
uncanny effect of such similar recurrences is a question I
can only lightly touch on in these pages; and I must refer the
reader instead to another work, 2 already completed, in which
this has been gone into in detail, but in a different connection.
For it is possible to recognize the dominance in the unconscious
mind of a ‘compulsion to repeat’ proceeding from the instinctual
impulses and probably inherent in the very nature of the in-
stincts — a compulsion powerful enough to overrule the pleasure
principle, lending to certain aspects of the mind their daemonic
character, and still very clearly expressed in the impulses of
small children; a compulsion, too, which is responsible for a
part of the course taken by the analyses of neurotic patients.
All these considerations prepare us for the discovery that what-
ever reminds us of this inner ‘compulsion to repeat’ is perceived
as uncanny.

Now, however, it is time to turn from these aspects of the
matter, which are in any case difficult to judge, and look for
some undeniable instances of the uncanny, in the hope that

1 [Freud had himself reached the age of 62 a year earlier, in 1918.]

2 [This was published a year later as Beyond the Pleasure Principle
(1920g). The various manifestations of the ‘compulsion to repeat*
enumerated here are enlarged upon in Chapters II and III of that

an analysis of them will decide whether our hypothesis is
a valid one.

In the story of ‘The Ring of Polycrates’, 1 the King of Egypt
turns away in horror from his host. Polycrates, because he sees
that his friend’s every wish is at once fulfilled, his every care
promptly removed by kindly fate. His host has become ‘un-
canny* to him. His own explanation, that the too fortunate man
has to fear the envy of the gods, seems obscure to us; its meaning
is veiled in mythological language. We will therefore turn to
another example in a less grandiose setting. In the case history
of an obsessional neurotic, 2 I have described how the patient
once stayed in a hydropathic establishment and benefited
greatly by it. He had the good sense, however, to attribute
his improvement not to the therapeutic properties of the
water, but to the situation of his room, which immediately
adjoined that of a very accommodating nurse. So on his second
visit to the establishment he asked for the same room, but was
told that it was already occupied by an old gentleman, where-
upon he gave vent to his annoyance in the words: ‘I wish he
may be struck dead for it.’ A fortnight later the old gentleman
really did have a stroke. My patient thought this an ‘uncanny’
experience. The impression of uncanniness would have been
stronger still if less time had elapsed between his words and the
untoward event, or if he had been able to report innumerable
similar coincidences. As a matter of fact, he had no difficulty in
producing coincidences of this sort; but then not only he but
every obsessional neurotic I have observed has been able to
relate analogous experiences. They are never surprised at their
invariably running up against someone they have just been
thinking of, perhaps for the first time for a long while. If they
say one day ‘I haven’t had any news of so-and-so for a long
time’, they will be sure to get a letter from him the next morn-
ing, and an accident or a death will rarely take place without
having passed through their mind a little while before. They
are in the habit of referring to this state of affairs in the most

work. The ‘compulsion to repeat’ had already been described by Freud
as a clinical phenomenon, in a technical paper published five years
earlier (1914#).]

1 [Schiller’s poem based on Herodotus.]

2 ‘Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis* (1909 d) [ Standard Ed.,
10,234].

240

THE ‘UNCANNY*

modest manner, saying that they have ‘presentiments’ which
‘usually* come true.

One of the most uncanny and wide-spread forms of super-
stition is the dread of the evil eye, which has been exhaustively
studied by the Hamburg oculist Seligmann (1910-11). There
never seems to have been any doubt about the source of this
dread. Whoever possesses something that is at once valuable
and fragile is afraid of other people’s envy, in so far as he pro-
jects on to them the envy he would have felt in their place. A
feeling like this betrays itself by a look 1 even though it is not put
into words; and when a man is prominent owing to noticeable,
and particularly owing to unattractive, attributes, other people
are ready to believe that his envy is rising to a more than usual
degree of intensity and that this intensity will convert it into
effective action. What is feared is thus a secret intention of
doing harm, and certain signs are taken to mean that that in-
tention has the necessary power at its command.

These last examples of the uncanny are to be referred to the
principle which I have called ‘omnipotence of thoughts’, t aking
the name from an expression used by one of my patients. 2 * * And
now we find ourselves on familiar ground. Our analysis of in-
stances of the uncanny has led us back to the old, animis tic
conception of the universe. This was characterized by the idea
that the world was peopled with the spirits of human beings;
by the subject’s narcissistic overvaluation of his own mental
processes; by the belief in the omnipotence of thoughts and the
technique of magic based on that belief; by the attribution to
various outside persons and things of carefiilly graded magical
powers, or ‘maned; as well as by all the other creations with the
help of which man, in the unrestricted narcissism of that stage
of development, strove to fend off the manifest prohibitions of
reality. It seems as if each one of us has been through a phase of
individual development corresponding to this animistic stage
in primitive men, that none of us has passed through it without
preserving certain residues and traces of it which are still cap-
able of manifesting themselves, and that everything which
* now strikes us as ‘uncanny’ fulfils the condition of touching

1 [‘The evil eye* in German is ‘der bose Blick literally ‘the evil

look’.]

a [The obsessional patient referred to just above— the ‘Rat Man*

(1909c?), Standard Ed. } 10, 233f.]

}

i

I

i

!

)

THE ‘UNCANNY* 241

those residues of animistic mental activity within us and bring-
ing them to expression. 1

At this point I will put forward two considerations which, I
think, contain the gist of this short study. In the first place, if
psycho-analytic theory is correct in maintaining that every
affect belonging to an emotional impulse, whatever its kind, is
transformed, if it is repressed, into anxiety, then among in-
stances of frightening things there must be one class in which
the frightening element can be shown to be something repressed
which recurs. This class of frightening things would then con-
stitute the uncanny; and it must be a matter of indifference
whether what is uncanny was itself originally frightening or
whether it carried some other affect. In the second place, if this
is indeed die secret nature of the uncanny, we can understand
why linguistic usage has extended das Heimliche [‘homely’] into
its opposite, das Unheimliche (p. 226); for this uncanny is in
reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar
and old-established in the mind and which has become alien-
ated from it only through the process of repression. This refer-
ence to the factor of repression enables us, furthermore, to
understand Schelling’s definition [p. 224] of the uncanny as
something which ought to have remained hidden but has come
to fight.

It only remains for us to test our new hypothesis on one or
two more examples of the uncanny.

Many people experience the feeling in the highest degree in
relation to death and dead bodies, to the return of the dead,
and to spirits and ghosts. As we have seen [p. 221] some
languages in use to-day can only render the German expression
an unheimlich house’ by ‘a haunted house*. We might indeed
have begun our investigation with this example, perhaps the
most striking 'of all, of something uncanny, but we refrained
from doing so because the uncanny in it is too much intermixed
with what is purely gruesome and is in part overlaid by it.
There is scarcely any other matter, however, upon which our

w . 10 . Km ana lab0 ° (1912-13), Essay III, ‘Animism,

Magic and foe Omnipotence of Thoughts’, where foe following footnote
wifi be found : We appear to attribute an “uncanny” quality to impres-
th f + , s f e . k . to confirm foe omnipotence of thoughts and foe animistic
mode of thinking in general, after we have reached a stage at which, in
our judgement, we have abandoned such beliefs.’ [Standard Ed., 13 86.]

242

THE ‘UNCANNY*

thoughts and feelings have changed so little since the very
earliest times, and in which discarded forms have been so com-
pletely preserved under a thin disguise, as our relation to death.

Two things account for our conservatism: the strength of our
original emotional reaction to death and the insufficiency of
our scientific knowledge about it. Biology has not yet been able
to decide whether death is the inevitable fate of every living
being or whether it is only a regular but yet perhaps avoidable 1

event in life . 1 It is true that the statement ‘All men are mortar
is paraded in text-books of logic as an example of a general 1

proposition; but no human being really grasps it, and our
unconscious has as little use now as it ever had for the idea of
its own mortality . 2 * * Religions continue to dispute the importance
of the undeniable fact of individual death and to postulate a life
after death; civil governments still believe that they cannot
maintain moral order among the living if they do not Uphold
the prospect of a better life hereafter as a recompense for mun- i

dane existence. In our great cities, placards announce lectures
that undertake to tell us how to get into touch with the souls of ,

the departed; and it cannot be denied that not a few of the
most able and penetrating minds among our men of science
have come to the conclusion, especially towards the close of
their own lives, that a contact of this kind is not impossible.

Since almost all of us still think as savages do on this topic, it is
no matter for surprise that the primitive fear of the dead is still
so strong within us and always ready to come to the surface on
any provocation. Most likely our fear still implies the old belief *

that the dead man becomes the enemy of his survivor and seeks
to carry him off to share his new life with him. Considering our l

unchanged attitude towards death, we might rather enquire
what has become of the repression, which is the necessary con-
dition of a primitive feeling recurring in the shape of something
uncanny. But repression is there, too. All supposedly educated
people have ceased to believe officially that the dead can be-
come visible as spirits, and have made any such appearances

1 [This problem figures prominently in Beyond the Pleasure Principle
(1920#), on which Freud was engaged while writing the present paper.

See Standard Ed,, 18,44 ffi] ■ (•

2 [Freud had discussed the individual’s attitude to death at greater

length in the second part of his paper ‘Thoughts for the Times on War

and Death* (19156).]

THE ‘UNCANNY*

243

dependent on improbable and remote conditions; their emo-
tional attitude towards their dead, moreover, once a highly
ambiguous and ambivalent one, has been toned down in the
higher strata of the mind into an unambiguous feeling of piety . 1

We have now only a few remarks to add — for animism, magic
and sorcery, the omnipotence of thoughts, man’s attitude to
death, involuntary repetition and the castration complex com-
prise practically all the factors which turn something frighten-
ing into something uncanny.

We can also speak of a living person as uncanny, and we do
so when we ascribe evil intentions to him. But that is not all; in
addition to this we must feel that his intentions to harm us are
going to be carried out with the help of special powers. A good
instance of this is the ‘Gettatore' , 2 that uncanny figure of Romanic
superstition which Schaeffer, with intuitive poetic feeling and
profound psycho-analytic understanding, has transformed into
a sympathetic character in his Josef Montfort . But the question
of these secret powers brings us back again to the realm of
animism. It was the pious Gretchen’s intuition that Mephisto-
pheles possessed secret powers of this kind that made him so
uncanny to her.

Sie fiihlt dass ich ganz sicher ein Genie,

Vielleicht sogar der Teufel bin . 8

The uncanny effect of epilepsy and of madness has the same
origin. The layman sees in them the working of forces hitherto
unsuspected in his fellow-men, but at the same time he is dimly
aware of them in remote comers of his own being. The Middle
Ages quite consistently ascribed all such maladies to the influ-
ence of demons, and in this their psychology was almost cor-
rect. Indeed, I should not be surprised to hear that psycho-
analysis, which is concerned with laying bare these hidden
forces, has itself become uncanny to many people for that very
reason. In one case, after I had succeeded — though none too
rapidly in effecting a cure in a girl who had been an invalid

1 Cf. Totem and Taboo [Standard Ed., 13, 66].

c ‘thrower’ (of bad luck), or ‘one who casts’ (the evil eye).

*— Schaeffer’s novel was published in 1918.]

8 [She feels that surely I’m a genius now, —

Perhaps the very Devil indeed!

Goethe, Faust , Part I (Scene 16),

(Bayard Taylor’s translation).]

244

THE ‘UNCANNY*

i

THE ’UNCANNY*

for many years, I myself heard this view expressed by the
patient’s mother long after her recovery.

Dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at the
wrist, as in a fairy tale of Hauff ’s , 1 feet which dance by them-
selves, as in the book by Schaeffer which I mentioned above —
all these have something peculiarly uncanny about them, especi-
ally when, as in the last instance, they prove capable of inde-
pendent activity in addition. As we already know, this kind of
uncanniness springs from its proximity to the castration com-
plex. To some people the idea of being buried alive by mistake
is the most uncanny thing of all. And yet psycho-analysis has
taught us that this terrifying phantasy is only a transformation
of another phantasy which had originally nothing terrifying
about it at all, but was qualified by a certain lasciviousness —
the phantasy, I mean, of intra-uterine existence . 2

There is one more point of general application which I should
like to add, though, strictly speaking, it has been included in
what has already been said about animism and modes of work-
ing of the mental apparatus that have been surmounted; for I
think it deserves special emphasis. This is that an uncanny
effect is often and easily produced when the distinction between
imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we
have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in
reality, or when a symbol takes over the foil functions of the
thing it symbolizes, and so on. It is this factor which contributes
not a little to the uncanny effect attaching to magical practices.
The infantile element in this, which also dominates the minds
of neurotics, is the over-accentuation of psychical reality in
comparison with material reality — a feature closely allied to
the belief in the omnipotence of thoughts. In the middle of the
isolation of war-time a number of the English Strand Magazine
fell into my hands; and, among other somewhat redundant
matter, I read a story about a young married couple who move
into a furnished house in which there is a curiously shaped table
with carvings of crocodiles on it. Towards evening an intoler-
able and very specific smell begins to pervade the house; they

1 [ Die Geschichte von der abgehauenen Hand (‘The Story of the Severed
Hand*).]

s [See Section VIII of Freud’s analysis of the ‘Wolf Man’ (19186).
above p. 101 ff.]

245

stumble over something in the dark; they seem to see a vague
form gliding over the stairs — in short, we are given to under-
stand that the presence of the table causes ghostly crocodiles to
haunt the place, or that the wooden monsters come to life in
the dark, or something of the sort. It was a naive enough story,
but the uncanny feeling it produced was quite remarkable.

To conclude this collection of examples, which is certainly
not complete, I will relate an instance taken from psycho-
analytic experience; if it does not rest upon mere coincidence,
it furnishes a beautiful confirmation of our theory of the
uncanny. It often happens that neurotic men declare that they
feel there is something uncanny about the female genital organs.
This unheimlich place, however, is the entrance to the former
Heim [home] of all human beings, to the place where each one
of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning. There is a
joking saying that ‘Love is home-sickness’; and whenever a man
dreams of a place or a country and says to himself, while he is
still dreaming: ‘this place is familiar to me. I’ve been here
before’, we may interpret the place as being his mother’s genitals
or her body . 1 In this case too, then, the unheimlich is what was
once heimisch , familiar; the prefix W [‘un-’] is the token of
repression . 8

Ill

In the course of this discussion the reader will have felt certain
doubts arising in his mind; and he must now have an oppor-
tunity of collecting them and bringing them forward.

It may be true that the uncanny [i unheimlich ] is something
which is secretly familiar [keimlich-heimisch], which has under-
gone repression and then returned from it, and that everything
that is uncanny fulfils this condition. But the selection of
material on this basis does not enable us to solve the problem of
the uncanny. For our proposition is clearly not convertible.
Not everything that fulfils this condition — not everything that
recalls repressed desires and surmounted modes of thinking be-

the prehistory of the individual and of the race — is on
that account uncanny.

Nor shall we conceal the fact that for almost every example

t V* Inter P retation of Dreams (1900a), Standard Ed., 5, 399.1

!>ee Freud’s paper on ‘Negation’ (19256).]

246

THE ‘UNCANNY*

adduced in support of our hypothesis one may be found which
rebuts it. The story of the severed hand in Hauff’s fairy tale
[p. 244] certainly has an uncanny effect, and we have traced
that effect back to the castration complex; but most readers will
probably agree with me in judging that no trace of uncanniness
is provoked by Herodotus’s story of the treasure of Rhamp-
sinitus, in which the master-thief, whom the princess tries to
hold fast by the hand, leaves his brother’s severed hand behind
with her instead. Again, the prompt fulfilment of the wishes of
Polycrates [p. 239] undoubtedly affects us in the same uncanny
way as it did the king of Egypt; yet our own fairy stories are
crammed with instantaneous wish-fulfilments which produce
no uncanny effect whatever. In the story of ‘The Three Wishes’,
the woman is tempted by the savoury smell of a sausage to wish
that she might have one too, and in an instant it lies on a plate
before her. In his annoyance at her hastiness her husband wishes
it may hang on her nose. And there it is, dangling from her nose.
All this is very striking but not in the least uncanny. Fairy tales
quite frankly adopt the animistic standpoint of the omnipotence
of thoughts and wishes, and yet I cannot think of any genuine
fairy story which has anything uncanny about it. We have
heard that it is in the highest degree uncanny when an inani-
mate object — a picture or a doll — comes to life; nevertheless in
Hans Andersen’s stories the household utensils, furniture and
tin soldiers are alive, yet nothing could well be more remote
from the uncanny. And we should hardly call it uncanny when
Pygmalion’s beautiful statue comes to life.

Apparent death and the re-animation of the dead have been
represented as most uncanny themes. But things of this sort too
are very common in fairy stories. Who would be so bold as to
call it uncanny, for instance, when Snow-White opens her eyes
once more? And the resuscitation of the dead in accounts of
miracles, as in the New Testament, elicits feelings quite unre-
lated to the uncanny. Then, too, the theme that achieves such
an indubitably uncanny effect, the unintended recurrence of
the same thing, serves other and quite different purposes in
another class of cases. We have already come across one example
[p. 237] in which it is employed to call up a feeling of the comic;
and we could multiply instances of this kind. Or again, it works
as a means of emphasis, and so on. And once more: what is, the
origin of the uncanny effect of silence, darkness and solitude?

THE ‘UNCANNY* 247

Do not these factors point to the part played by danger in the
genesis of what is uncanny, notwithstanding that in children
these same factors are the most frequent determinants of the
expression of fear [rather than of the uncanny]? And are we
after all justified in entirely ignoring intellectual uncertainty as
a factor, seeing that we have admitted its importance in relation
to death [p. 242]?

It is evident therefore, that we must be prepared to admit
that there are other elements besides those which we have so far
laid down as determining the production of uncanny feelings.
We might say that these preliminary results have satisfied
psycho-analytic interest in the problem of the uncanny, and that
what remains probably calls for an aesthetic enquiry. But that
would be to open the door to doubts about what exactly is the
value of our general contention that thie uncanny proceeds from
something familiar which has been repressed.

We have noticed one point which may help us to resolve
these uncertainties: nearly all the instances that contradict our
hypothesis are taken from the realm of fiction, of imaginative
writing. This suggests that we should differentiate between the
uncanny that we actually experience and the uncanny that we
merely picture or read about.

What is experienced as uncanny is much more simply con-
ditioned but comprises far fewer instances. We shall find, I
think, that it fits in perfectly with our attempt at a solution, and
can be traced back without exception to something familiar
that has been repressed. But here, too, we must make a certain
important and psychologically significant differentiation in our
material, which is best illustrated by turning to suitable
examples.

Let us take the uncanny associated with the omnipotence of
thoughts, with the prompt fulfilment of wishes, with secret
injurious powers and with the return of the dead. The condition
under which the feeling of uncanniness arises here is unmis-
takable. We — or our primitive forefathers — once believed that
these possibilities were realities, and were convinced that they
actually happened. Nowadays we no longer believe in them, we
have surmounted these modes of thought; but we do not feel quite
sure of our new beliefs, and the old ones still exist wi thin us
ready to seize upon any confirmation. As soon as something
actually happens in our lives which seems to confirm the old,

248

THE ‘UNCANNY*

discarded beliefs we get a feeling of the uncanny; it is as though
we were making a judgement something like this: ‘So, after all,
it is true that one can kill a person by the mere wish ! 5 or, ‘So the
dead do live on and appear on the scene of their former activ-
ities!* and so on. Conversely, anyone who has completely and
finally rid himself of animistic beliefs will be insensible to this
type of the uncanny. The most remarkable coincidences of wish
and fulfilment, the most mysterious repetition of similar experi-
ences in a particular place or on a particular date, the most
deceptive sights and suspicious noises — none of these things will
disconcert him or raise the kind of fear which can be described
as ‘a fear of something uncanny*. The whole thing is purely an
affair of ‘reality-testing’, a question of the material reality of the
phenomena . 1

The state of affairs is different when the uncanny proceeds
from repressed infantile complexes, from the castration com-
plex, womb-phantasies, etc.; but experiences which arouse this
kind of uncanny feeling are not of very frequent occurrence in
real life. The uncanny which proceeds from actual experience
belongs for the most part to the first group [the group dealt with
in the previous paragraph]. Nevertheless the distinction be-
tween the two is theoretically very important. Where the

1 Since the uncanny effect of a ‘double* also belongs to this same
group it is interesting to observe what the effect is of meeting one’s own
image unbidden and unexpected. Ernst Mach has related two such
observations in his Analyse der Empfindungen (1900, 3). On the first
occasion he was not a little starded when he realized that the face
before him was his own. The second time he formed a very unfav ourable
opinion about the supposed stranger who entered the omnibus, and
thought ‘What a shabby-looking school-master that man is who is
getting in!’ — I can report a similar adventure. I was sitting alone in my
wagon-lit compartment when a more than usually violent jolt of the
train swung back the door of the adjoining washing-cabinet, and an
elderly gendeman in a dressing-gown and a travelling cap came in. I
assumed that in leaving the washing-cabinet, which lay between the
two compartments, he had taken the wrong direction and come into my
compartment by mistake. Jumping up with the intention of putting him
right, I at once realized to my dismay that the intruder was nothing but
my own reflection in the looking-glass on the open door. I can still
recollect that I thoroughly dislik e d his appearance. Instead, therefore,
of being frightened by our ‘doubles’, both Mach and I simp ly failed to
recognize them as such. Is it not possible, though, that our dislike of
them was a vestigial trace of the archaic reaction which feels the
‘double’ to be something uncanny?

THE ‘UNCANNY* 249

uncanny comes from infantile complexes the question of material
reality does not arise; its place is taken by psychical reality.
What is involved is an actual repression of some content of
thought and a return of this repressed content, not a cessation
of belief in the reality of such a content. We might say that in the
one case what had been repressed is a particular ideational con-
tent, and in the other the belief in its (material) reality. But
this last phrase no doubt extends the term ‘repression’ beyond
its legitimate meaning. 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]. Our conclusion could then be stated
thus: an uncanny experience occurs either when infantile com-
plexes which have been repressed are once more revived by
some impression, or when primitive beliefs which have been
surmounted seem once more to be confirmed. Finally, we must
not let our predilection for smooth solutions and lucid ex-
position blind us to the fact that these two classes of uncanny
experience are not always sharply distinguishable. When we
consider that primitive beliefs are most intimately connected
with infantile complexes, and are, in fact, based on them, we
shall not be greatly astonished to find that the distinction is
often a hazy one.

The uncanny as it is depicted in literature , in stories and
imaginative productions, merits in truth a separate discussion.
Above all, it is a much more fertile province than the uncanny
in real life, for it contains the whole of the latter and something
more besides, something that cannot be found in real life. The
contrast between what has been repressed and what has been
surmounted cannot be transposed on to the uncanny in fiction
without profound modification; for the realm of phantasy
depends for its effect on the fact that its content is not submitted
to reality-testing. The somewhat paradoxical result is that in the
first place a great deal that is not uncanny in fiction would be so if it
happened in real life ; and in the second place that there are many more
means of creating uncanny effects in fiction than there are in real life .

The imaginative writer has this licence among many others,
that he can select his world of representation so that it either
coincides with the realities we are familiar with or departs from
them in what particulars he pleases. We accept his ruling in

250

THE ‘UNCANNY*

THE ‘UNCANNY’

every case. In fairy tales, for instance, the world of reality is left
behind from the very start, and the animistic system of beliefs
is frankly adopted. Wish-fulfilments, secret powers, omni-
potence of thoughts, animation of inanimate objects, all the
elements so common in fairy stories, can exert no uncanny
influence here; for, as we have learnt, that feeling cannot arise
unless there is a conflict of judgement as to whether things
which have been ‘surmounted’ and are regarded as incredible
may not, after all, be possible; and this problem is eliminated
from the outset by the postulates of the world of fairy tales. Thus
we see that fairy stories, which have furnished us with most of
the contradictions to our hypothesis of the uncanny, confirm
the first part of our proposition — that in the realm of fiction
many things are not uncanny which would be so if they hap-
pened in real life. In the case of these stories there are other
contributory factors, which we shall briefly touch upon later.

The creative writer can also choose a setting which though
less imaginary than the world of fairy tales, does yet differ from
the real world by admitting superior spiritual beings such as
daemonic spirits or ghosts of the dead. So long as they remain
within their setting of poetic reality, such figures lose any
uncanniness which they might possess. The souls in Dante’s
Inferno , or the supernatural apparitions in Shakespeare’s Ham-
let, Macbeth or Julius Caesar , may be gloomy and terrible enough,
but they are no more really uncanny than Homer’s jovial world
of gods. We adapt our judgement to the imaginary reality
imposed on us by the writer, and regard souls, spirits and ghosts
as though their existence had the same validity as our own has
in material reality. In this case too we avoid all trace of the
uncanny.

The situation is altered as soon as the writer pretends to move
in the world of common reality. In this case he accepts as well
all the conditions operating to produce uncanny feelings in real
life; and everything that would have an uncanny effect in
reality has it in his story. But in this case he can even increase
his effect and multiply it far beyond what could happen in
reality, by bringing about events which never or very rarely
happen in fact. In doing this he is in a sense betraying us to the
superstitiousness which we have ostensibly surmounted; he
deceives us by promising to give us the sober truth, and then
after all overstepping it. We react to his inventions as we would

251

have reacted to real experiences; by the time we have seen
through his trick it is already too late and the author has
achieved his object. But it must be added that his success is not
unalloyed. We retain a feeling of dissatisfaction, a kind of grudge
against the attempted deceit. I have noticed this particularly
after reading Schnitzler’s Die Weissagung [ The Prophecy ] and
similar stories which flirt with the supernatural. However, the
writer has one more means which he can use in order to avoid
our recalcitrance and at the same time to improve his chances
of success. He can keep us in the dark for a long time about the
precise nature of the presuppositions on which the world he
writes about is based, or he can cunningly and ingeniously
avoid any definite information on the point to the last. Speak-
ing generally, however, we find a confirmation of the second
part of our proposition — that fiction presents more oppor-
tunities for creating uncanny feelings than are possible in real
life.

Strictly speaking, all these complications relate only to that
class of the uncanny which proceeds from forms of thought that
have been surmounted. The class which proceeds from re-
pressed complexes is more resistant and remains as powerful
in fiction as in real experience, subject to one exception [see
p. 252]. The uncanny belonging to the first class — that pro-
ceeding from forms of thought that have been surmounted — ■
retains its character not only in experience but in fiction as well,
so long as the setting is one of material reality; but where it is
given an arbitrary and artificial setting in fiction, it is apt to
lose that character.

We have clearly not exhausted the possibilities of poetic
licence and the privileges enjoyed by story-writers in evoking
or in excluding an uncanny feeling. In the main we adopt an
unvarying passive attitude towards real experience and are sub-
ject to the influence of our physical environment. But the story-
teller has a peculiarly directive power over us; by means of the
moods he can put us into, he is able to guide the current of our
emotions, to dam it up in one direction and make it flow in
another, and he often obtains a great variety of effects from the
same material. All this is nothing new, and has doubtless long
since been fully taken into account by students of aesthetics.
We have drifted into this field of research half involuntarily,
through the temptation to explain certain instances which
s.f. xvn— - R

252

THE ‘UNCANNY*

contradicted our theory of the causes of the uncanny. Accord-
ingly we will now return to the examination of a few of those
instances.

We have already asked [p. 246] why it is that the severed
hand in the story of the treasure of Rhampsinitus has no un-
canny effect in the way that the severed hand has in Hauff’s
story. The question seems to have gained in importance now
that we have recognized that the class of the uncanny which
proceeds from repressed complexes is the more resistant of the
two. The answer is easy. In the Herodotus story our thoughts
are concentrated much more on the superior c unnin g of the
master-thief than on the feelings of the princess. The princess
may very well have had an uncanny feeling, indeed she very
probably fell into a swoon; but we have no such sensations, for
we put ourselves in the thief’s place, not in hers. In Nestroy’s
farce, Der % errissene [ The Tom Man], another means is used to
avoid any impression of the uncanny in the scene in which the
fleeing man, convinced that he is a murderer, lifts up one trap-
door after another and each time sees what he takes to be the
ghost of his victim rising up out of it. He calls out in despair,
‘But I’ve only killed one man. Why this ghastly multiplication?’
We know what went before this scene and do not share his error,
so what must be uncanny to him has an irresistibly comic effect
on us. Even a ‘real’ ghost, as in Oscar Wilde’s Cantewille Ghost ,
loses all power of at least arousing gruesome feelings in us as soon
as the author begins to amuse himself by being ironical about
it and allows liberties to be taken with it. Thus we see how inde-
pendent emotional effects can be of the actual subject-matter
in the world of fiction. In fairy stories feelings of fear — including
therefore uncanny feelings — are ruled out altogether. We
understand this, and that is why we ignore any opportunities
we find in them for developing such feelings.

Concerning the factors of silence, solitude and darkness
[pp. 246-7], we can only say that they are actually elements in
the production of the infantile anxiety from which the majority
of human beings have never become quite free. This problem
has been discussed from a psycho-analytic point of view
elsewhere. 1

1 [See the discussion of children’s fear of the dark in Section V of the
third of Freud’s Three Essays (1905J), Standard Ed., 7, 224 n.]

APPENDIX

Extract from Daniel Sanders’s Worterbuch
DER DeUTSCHEN SprACHE 1

Heimlich, a. (-keit, f. -en): 1. auch Heimelich, heimelig, zum
Hause gehorig, nicht fremd, vertraut, zahm, traut und traulich,
anheimelnd etc. (a) (veralt.) zum Haus, zur Familie gehorig
oder: wie dazu gehorig betrachtet, vgl. lat. familiaris, ver-
traut: Die Heimlichen, die Hausgenossen; Der heimliche Rath.
1. Mos. 41, 45; 2. Sam. 23, 23. 1 Chr. 12, 25. Weish. 8, 4.,
wofur jetzt: Geheimer (s. d 1.) Rath iiblich ist, s. Heimlicher—
(b) von Thieren zahm, sich den Menschen traulich anschlie-
Bend. Ggstz. wild, z. B.: Thier, die weder wild noch heimlich
sind, etc. Eppendorf. 88; Wilde Thier ... so man sie h. und
gewohnsam um die Leute aufzeucht. 92. So diese Thierle von
Jugend bei den Menschen erzogen, werden sie ganz h., freund-
lich etc., Stumpf 608a etc.— So noch: So h. ist’s (das Lamm) und
fiiBt aus meiner Hand. Holty; Ein schoner, heimelicher (s. c)
Vogel bleibt der Storch immerhin. Linck, Schl. 146. s. Haus-
lich 1 etc. — (c) traut, traulich anheimelnd; das Wohlgefiihl
stiller Befriedigung etc., behagiicher Ruhe u. sichem Schutzes,
wie das umschlossne, wohnliche Haus erregend (vgl, Geheuer):
Ist dir’s h. noch im Lande, wo die Fremden deine Walder
roden? Alexis H. 1, 1, 289; Es war ihr nicht allzu h. bei ihm.
Brentano Wehm. 92; Auf einem hohen h — en Schattenpfade
. . ., langs dem rieselnden rauschenden und platschemden
Waldbach. Forster B. 1, 417. Die H— keit der Heimath zer-
storen. Gervinus Lit. 5, 375. So vertraulich und h. habe ich
nicht leicht ein Platzchen gefunden. G[oethe], 14, 14; Wir
dachten es uns so bequem, so artig, so gemiithlich und h. 15, 9;
In stiller H— keit, umzielt von engen Schranken. Haller; Einer
sorglichen Hausfrau, die mit dem Wenigsten eine vergntigliche
H — keit (Hauslichkeit) zu schaffen versteht. Hartmann Unst.
1, 188; Desto h er kam ihm jetzt der ihm erst kurz noch so
fremde Mann vor. Kemer 540; Die protestantischen Besitzer
fuhlen sich . . . nicht h. unter ihren katholischen Unterthanen.
Kohl. Irl. 1, 172; Wenns h. wird und leise/die Abendstille nur

1 [Cf. p. 222.]

253