The uncanny

The uncanny is an aesthetic and psychological category most fully formulated by Sigmund Freud in his essay 'Das Unheimliche' (1919). Freud defined the uncanny as a particular kind of dread that arises when something is at once familiar and strange: when the long-repressed returns in a familiar guise. The German unheimlich literally means 'un-homely', the opposite of the cosy and safe, and it is precisely the fusion of the familiar and the disturbing that produces this peculiar sensation. Examples include dolls, waxworks, automata, doubles and objects that seem to come alive — everything that hovers on the border between the living and the inanimate. The concept had an enormous influence on twentieth-century art, especially Surrealism: Giorgio de Chirico, Hans Bellmer, Meret Oppenheim and Max Ernst deliberately created images that evoke this uneasy anxiety. Later the uncanny became an important tool for the critical analysis of photography, installation and other media, notably in the writings of the art historian Hal Foster. The category remains productive for discussing works that unsettle the boundary between the familiar and the strange, the living and the dead, the real and the imagined, provoking in the viewer a deep psychological disquiet.