The uncanny is the weird, the strange, the mysterious, a mingling of the familiar and the unfamiliar. Even Freud, patron of the uncanny, had trouble defining it. Yet the uncanny is everywhere in contemporary culture. In this elegant book, Nicholas Royle takes the reader across literature, film, philosophy, and psychoanalysis as he marks the trace of the uncanny in the modern world. Not an introduction in the usual sense, Nicholas Royle's book is a geography of the uncanny as it (...) manifests itself - and disturbs our thinking - in a range of disciplines. (shrink)

Schelling, Freud, and the Philosophical Foundations of Psychoanalysisprovides a long-overdue dialogue between two seminal thinkers, Schelling and Freud. Through a sustained reading of the sublime, mythology, the uncanny, and freedom, this book provokes the reader to retrieve and revive the shared roots of philosophy and psychoanalysis. Teresa Fenichel examines the philosophical basis for the concepts of the unconscious and for the nature of human freedom on which psychoanalysis rests. Drawing on the work of German philosopher F.W.J. Schelling, the (...) author explores how his philosophical understanding of human actions, based as it was on the ideas of drives, informed and helped shape Freud's work. Fenichel also stresses the philosophical weight of Freudian psychoanalysis, specifically in regards to the problem of freedom and argues that psychoanalysis complicates and reinforces Schelling's basic idea: to know reality we must engage with the world empathetically and intimately. This book also serves as an introduction to Schelling's thought, arguing that his metaphysics--particularly concerning the primacy of the unconscious and of fantasy--can be read as a therapeutic endeavour. Finally, the book offers a deep re-thinking of the action and nature of sublimation through both Freud's and Schelling's texts. Fenichel suggests psychoanalytic therapy is self-interpretation--a recognition of our narratives as narratives, without for that reason taking them any less seriously. Schelling, Freud, and the Philosophical Foundations of Psychoanalysis will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists as well as scholars of philosophy. (shrink)

Explores the conceptualization of the Freudian uncanny in various late-twentieth-century theoretical and critical discourses (literary studies, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, art history, trauma studies, architecture, etc.).

The uncanniness of Freud's uncanny -- Alligators, crocodiles and the monstrous uncanny -- The uncanny urban underside -- The uncanniness of Schelling's uncanny -- The uncanny and the work of Walter Benjamin -- The uncanny cyborg -- The uncanny and the fictional -- The uncanny and the modern adult literary fairy tale -- The uncanny and the gothic vampire romance -- The uncanny and the detective story -- The uncanny and the weird horror story -- The uncanny and the dystopian (...) science fiction novel -- The uncanny and the historiographic metafictional novel -- The uncanny commonwealth of Christianity -- The living Polytheism of the Fung Loy Kok institute of Taoism/Taoist Tai Chi. (shrink)

_The Urban Uncanny_ explores through ten engaging essays the slippage or mismatch between our expectations of the city—as the organised and familiar environments in which citizens live, work, and go about their lives—and the often surprising and unsettling experiences it evokes. The city is uncanny when it reveals itself in new and unexpected light; when its streets, buildings, and people suddenly appear strange, out of place, and not quite right. Bringing together a variety of approaches, including psychoanalysis, historical and (...) contemporary case study of cities, urban geography, film and literary critique, the essays explore some of the unsettling mismatches between city and citizen in order to make sense of each, and to gauge the wellbeing of city life more generally. Essays examine a number of cities, including Edmonton, London, Paris, Oxford, Las Vegas, Berlin and New York, and address a range of issues, including those of memory, death, anxiety, alienation, and identity. Delving into the complex repercussions of contemporary mass urban development, _The Urban Uncanny_ opens up the pathological side of cities, both real and imaginary. This interdisciplinary collection provides unparalleled insights into the urban uncanny that will be of interest to academics and students of urban studies, urban geography, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, social studies and film studies, and to anyone interested in the darker side of city life. (shrink)

Exploring the links between Speculative Realism, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism, this article examines OOO’s entanglement with the ‘uncanny’. Reading OOO against three notable treatments of the concept - Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay “The ‘Uncanny’”, Ernst Jentsch’s 1906 paper “On the Psychology of the Uncanny”, and Martin Heidegger’s discussion of uncanniness in his Introduction to Metaphysics - it argues that OOO reconfigures the ‘uncanny’ as a profoundly ontological concept premised on aesthetic enstrangement. Using E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short story “The Sandman” as (...) a case study, it assesses what the consequences of this reconfiguration are for literary criticism and, in particular, the study of the Gothic. By splicing OOO into the history and practice of Gothic scholarship, this article traces the outline of an “object-oriented uncanny”, pushing the ‘uncanny’ out of Freud’s shadow and into the “great outdoors”. (shrink)

The popular image of Japanese society is a steroetypical one - that of a people characterised by a coherent set of thought and behaviour patterns, applying to all Japanese and transcending time. Ross Mouer and Yoshio Sugimoto found this image quite incongruous during their research for this book in Japan. They ask whether this steroetype of the Japanese is not only generated by foreigners but by the Japanese themselves. This is likely to be a controversial book as it does not (...) contribute to the continuing mythologising of Japan and the Japanese. The book examines contemporary images of Japanese society by surveying an extensive sample of popular and academic literature on Japan. After tracing the development of "holistic" theories about the Japanese, commonly referred to as the "group model", attention is focused on the evaluation of that image. Empirical evidence contrary to this model is discussed and methodological lacunae are cited. A "sociology of Japanology" is also presented. In pursuit of other visions of Japanese society, the authors argue that certain aspects of Japanese behaviour can be explained by considering Japanese society as the exact inverse of the portayal provided by the group model. The authors also present a multi-dimensional model of social stratification, arguing that much of the variation in Japanese behaviour can be understood within the framework as having universal equivalence. (shrink)

This volume is an introduction to the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature. Jean-Michel Rabaté takes Sigmund Freud as his point of departure, studying in detail Freud's integration of literature in the training of psychoanalysts and how literature provided crucial terms for his myriad theories, such as the Oedipus complex. Rabaté subsequently surveys other theoreticians such as Wilfred Bion, Marie Bonaparte, Carl Jung, Jacques Lacan, and Slavoj Žižek. This Introduction is organized thematically, examining in detail important terms like deferred action, (...) fantasy, hysteria, paranoia, sublimation, the uncanny, trauma, and perversion. Using examples from Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare to Sophie Calle and Yann Martel, Rabaté demonstrates that the psychoanalytic approach to literature, despite its erstwhile controversy, has recently reemerged as a dynamic method of interpretation. (shrink)

This book brings Jacques Lacan's work on the problem of anxiety into a jarring and fruitful confrontation with phenomenology, existentialism, and the 'jargon' of authenticity. Brian Robertson masterfully upends a host of received philosophical truths - most notably, and crucially, the idea that anxiety 'lacks an object.'.

Demonstrating the connections between contemporary psychoanalysis, Jewish thought and Jewish history, this volume is a significant contribution to the traditions of dialogue, debate and change-within-continuity that epitomize these disciplines. The authors of this volume explore the cross-disciplinary connections between psychoanalysis and Jewish thought, while seeking out the resonance of new meanings, to exemplify the uncanny similarities that exist between ancient Rabbinic methods of interpretation and contemporary psychoanalytic theory and methodology, particularly the centrality of the question and the deconstruction (...) of narrative. In doing so, this collaboration addresses the bi-directional influence between, and the relevance of, the Jewish interpretive tradition and psychoanalysis to provide readers with renewed insight into key topics such as Biblical text and midrash, religious traditions, trauma, gender, history, clinical work and the legacies of the Holocaust on psychoanalytic theory. Creating an intimate environment for interdisciplinary dialogue, this is an essential book for students, scholars and clinicians alike, who seek to understand the continued significance of the multiple connections between psychoanalysis and Jewish thought. (shrink)

Embodied interface agents are designed to ease the use of technology. Furthermore, they present one possible solution for future interaction scenarios beyond the desktop metaphor. Trust and believability play an important role in the relationship between user and the virtual counterpart. In order to reach this goal, a high degree of anthropomorphism in appearance and behavior of the artifact is pursued. According to the notion of the Uncanny Valley, however, this actually may have quite the opposite effect. This article provides (...) an analysis of the Uncanny Valley effect from a cultural and gender studies perspective. It invites readers to take a closer look at the narratives that influence the production of anthropomorphic artifacts. The article starts with a short introduction of the idea of the Uncanny Valley and gives a brief overview of current artifacts. Following this, a semiotic view on computer science is proposed, which in a further step serves as an epistemological grounding for a gender-critical rereading of the Turing test. This perspective will be supported by analyzing a classic story of user and artifact—E.T.A. Hoffmann’s narration of Olimpia. Finally, the special character of anthropomorphic artifacts is discussed by taking Freud’s concept of “Das Unheimliche”, as well as theories of identity formation into consideration, closing with a plea for a more diverse artifact production. (shrink)

Psychological attitudes towards service and personal robots are selectively examined from the vantage point of psychoanalysis. Significant case studies include the uncanny valley effect, brain-actuated robots evoking magic mental powers, parental attitudes towards robotic children, idealizations of robotic soldiers, persecutory fantasies involving robotic components and systems. Freudian theories of narcissism, animism, infantile complexes, ego ideal, and ideal ego are brought to bear on the interpretation of these various items. The horizons of Human-robot Interaction are found to afford new and (...) fertile grounds for psychoanalytic theorizing beyond strictly therapeutic contexts. (shrink)

A revelatory new theory of consciousness that returns emotions to the center of mental life. For Mark Solms, one of the boldest thinkers in contemporary neuroscience, discovering how consciousness comes about has been a lifetime's quest. Scientists consider it the "hard problem" because it seems an impossible task to understand why we feel a subjective sense of self and how it arises in the brain. Venturing into the elementary physics of life, Solms has now arrived at an astonishing answer. In (...) The Hidden Spring, he brings forward his discovery in accessible language and graspable analogies. Solms is a frank and fearless guide on an extraordinary voyage from the dawn of neuropsychology and psychoanalysis to the cutting edge of contemporary neuroscience, adhering to the medically provable. But he goes beyond other neuroscientists by paying close attention to the subjective experiences of hundreds of neurological patients, many of whom he treated, whose uncanny conversations expose much about the brain's obscure reaches. Most importantly, you will be able to recognize the workings of your own mind for what they really are, including every stray thought, pulse of emotion, and shift of attention. The Hidden Spring will profoundly alter your understanding of your own subjective experience. (shrink)

"The king is dead. Long live the king!" In early modern Europe, the king's body was literally sovereign—and the right to rule was immediately transferrable to the next monarch in line upon the king's death. In The Royal Remains, Eric L. Santner argues that the "carnal" dimension of the structures and dynamics of sovereignty hasn't disappeared from politics. Instead, it migrated to a new location—the life of the people—where something royal continues to linger in the way we obsessively track and (...) measure the vicissitudes of our flesh. Santner demonstrates the ways in which democratic societies have continued many of the rituals and practices associated with kingship in displaced, distorted, and usually, unrecognizable forms. He proposes that those strange mental activities Freud first lumped under the category of the unconscious—which often manifest themselves in peculiar physical ways—are really the uncanny second life of these "royal remains," now animated in the body politic of modern neurotic subjects. Pairing Freud with Kafka, Carl Schmitt with Hugo von Hofmannsthal,and Ernst Kantorowicz with Rainer Maria Rilke, Santner generates brilliant readings of multiple texts and traditions of thought en route to reconsidering the sovereign imaginary. Ultimately, The Royal Remains locates much of modernity—from biopolitical controversies to modernist literary experiments—in this transition from subjecthood to secular citizenship. This major new work will make a bold and original contribution to discussions of politics, psychoanalysis, and modern art and literature. (shrink)

Perhaps the best way to understand Harold Bloom's enigmatic theory of "poetic misprision" is to avoid the immanent critique altogether. It is best described, rather , as a synthesis. Bloom seems to have taken Aristotle's mimesis and linked it to Freud's concept of sublimation,1 with particular emphasis on the role that sublimation plays in "the family romance." Even if one were to hedge a bit and take into account the fact that neo-Freudian re-evaluations of orthodox psychoanalysis have succeeded in (...) extracting the purely sexual component out of the psychodynamics of sublimation, one is still left with the notion of sublimation as anxiety producing. Thus it is that, according to Bloom, the modern poet, in particular, sublimates his imitation of a strong precursor poet. Since the emphasis today is on desexualizing libido, Freud's original sexual vocabulary seems to have survived for its metaphorical value alone; the "unconscious fear of castration," for example, is simply a metaphor for "the poet's fear of ceasing to be a poet," a man's fear of ceasing to be a man. No matter how much we "modernize" Freud, the fact will always remain that the psychoanalytic context is the context of psychopathology: "a variety of the uncanny." · 1. See Sigmund Freud, Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex, in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. A. A. Brill , pp. 625-26. David D. Cooper is an associate in the department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Using the critical paradigm developed in the present essay, he has written a book on Thomas Merton's poetry. See also: "Poetry, Revisionism, Repression" by Harold Boom in Vol. 2, No. 2; "Formalism, Savagery, and Care; or, The Function of Criticism Once Again" by Jerome J. McGann in Vol. 2, No. 3. (shrink)

This paper concerns the role of the unconscious in technology. The central thesis is that there exists an experience of non-acceptance and failed incorporation of technology, which (a) does not depend on the technical engineering dimension of the artifact but (b) instead concerns the relationship between the human unconscious and the artifact. This thesis is supported and developed through the analysis of a case study – that is, the creation and development of the first version of Google Glass. The failure (...) of the first version of Google Glass is explained in terms of the non-acceptance of this technology. This paper presents an analysis of users’ experiences and comments as a basis for interpreting the relationship between the unconscious and technology. Their non-acceptance of this technology is explained and further clarified from a postphenomenological point of view, utilizing the concept of “technological uncanny.” The analysis suggests that antimediation can be understood as a form of noise. In fact, as non-acceptance, antimediation directly concerns the relationship between contingency and control. (shrink)

Whenever the membranes of the egg in which the foetus emerges on its way to becoming a new-born are broken, imagine for a moment that something flies off, and that one can do it with an egg as easily as with a man, namely the hommelette, or the lamella. The lamella is something extra-flat, which moves like the amoeba. It is just a little more complicated. But it goes everywhere. And as it is something - I will tell you shortly (...) why - that is related to what the sexed being loses in sexuality, it is, like the amoeba in relation to sexed beings, immortal - because it survives any division, and scissiparous intervention. And it can turn around. Well! This is not very reassuring. But suppose it comes and envelopes your face while you are quietly asleep... I can't see how we would not join battle with a being capable of these properties. But it would not be a very convenient battle. This lamella, this organ, whose characteristic is not to exist, but which is nevertheless an organ - I can give you more details as to its zoological place - is the libido. It is the libido, qua pure life instinct, that is to say, immortal life, irrepressible life, life that has need of no organ, simplified, indestructible life. It is precisely what is subtracted from the living being by virtue of the fact that it is subject to the cycle of sexed reproduction. And it is of this that all the forms of the objet a that can be enumerated are the representatives, the equivalents. Every word has a weight here, in this deceivingly poetic description of the mythic creature called by Lacan "lamella". Lacan imagines lamella as a version of what Freud called "partial object": a weird organ which is magically autonomized, surviving without a body whose organ it should have been, like a hand that wonders around alone in early Surrealist films, or like the smile in Alice in Wonderland that persists alone, even when the Cheshire cat's body is no longer present: "'All right', said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone. 'Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin', thought Alice; 'but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!'" The lamella is an entity of pure surface, without the density of a substance, an infinitely plastic object that can not only incessantly change its form, but can even transpose itself from one to another medium: imagine a "something" that is first heard as a shrilling sound, and then pops up as a monstrously distorted body. A lamella is indivisible, indestructible, and immortal - more precisely, undead in the sense this term has in horror fiction: not the sublime spiritual immortality, but the obscene immortality of the "living dead" which, after every annihilation, re-composes themselves and clumsily goes on. As Lacan puts it in his terms, lamella does not exist, it insists: it is unreal, an entity of pure semblance, a multiplicity of appearances which seem to envelop a central void - its status is purely fantasmatic. This blind indestructible insistence of the libido is what Freud called "death drive," and one should bear in mind that "death drive" is, paradoxically, the Freudian name for its very opposite, for the way immortality appears within psychoanalysis: for an uncanny excess of life, for an "undead" urge which persist beyond the cycle of life and death, of generation and corruption. This is why Freud equates death drive with the so-called "compulsion-to-repeat," an uncanny urge to repeat painful past experiences which seems to outgrow the natural limitations of the organism affected by it and to insist even beyond the organism's death - again, like the living dead in a horror film who just go on. This excess inscribes itself into the human body in the guise of a wound which makes the subject "undead," depriving him of the capacity to die : when this wound is healed, the hero can die in peace. (shrink)

Memories and Monsters explores the nature of the monstrous or uncanny, and the way psychological trauma relates to memory and narration. This interdisciplinary book works on the borderland between psychology and philosophy, drawing from scholars in both fields who have helped mould the bourgeoning field of relational psychoanalysis and phenomenological and existential psychology. The editors have sought out contributions to this field that speak to the pressing question: how are we to attend to and contend with our monsters? The (...) authors in this volume examine the ways in which we might best relate to our monsters, and how the legacies of ancient traumas and anxieties continue to affect our current stories, memories and everyday practices. Covering such manifestations of the monstrous as racism, crimes against humanity, trauma as portrayed in music and art, and the Holocaust, this book explores the impact the uncanny has on our individual and collective psyches. By focusing on a very specific theme, and one that excites the imagination, Memories and Monsters stokes the flames of an important current movement in relational psychoanalysis. It will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, as well as professionals in psychology and graduate school students and tutors in the fields of both psychology and philosophy. (shrink)

Gedankenübertragung. Gegenübertragung. Thought-transference and counter-transference have rarely been considered together. One is a key instrument in much contemporary psychoanalytic practice and the other simply occultism. This essay traces the striking parallels in Sigmund Freud's interests in both. Its tale is the uncanny narrative of his essay ‘Psychoanalysis and Telepathy’. The story starts from Freud's engagements with Sándor Ferenczi and Carl Jung to speculate that his unpublished paper may be the article on counter-transference he promised but never wrote. The repressed (...) returns in the history and practice of psychoanalysis — and in Shoshana Felman's uncanny reading effect. (shrink)