The Uncanny

the uncanny is “undoubtedly related to what is frightening—to what arouses dread and horror” (514).

“the uncanny is that class of frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” (515).

“Something has to be added to what is novel and unfamiliar in order to make it uncanny” (515).

“among its different shades of meaning the word heimlich exhibits one [meaning] which is identical with its opposite, unheimlich. . . . the word ‘heimlich’ is not unambiguous, 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 concealed and kept out of sight” (517).

“heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or others a sub-species of heimlich” (518).

“whatever reminds us of this inner “compulsion to repeat” is perceived as uncanny” (525).

“Our analysis of instances of the uncanny has led us back to the old, animistic conception of the universe” (525).

“if . . . every affect belonging to an emotional impulse, whatever its kind, is transformed, if it is repressed, into anxiety, then among instances of frightening things there must be one class in which the frightening element can be shown to be something repressed which recurs” (526).

“[the] uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression” (526).

“an uncanny effect is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced” (528).

“an uncanny experience occurs either when infantile complexes 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 . . . the distinction is a hazy one . . . primitive beliefs are most intimately connected with infantile complexes” (530).

“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” (531).