Freud: The Uncanny
While I was reading and attempting to decipher Freudâs essay, âThe Uncanny,â I started to think about how it related to Paul Austerâs novel, âThe New York Trilogy,â which pretty much celebrates the uncanny. Freud states that the uncanny is âin 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. [The uncanny is] something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light. When experiencing the uncanny, the unknown appears as something which is â paradoxically â familiar (Freud 132). In Austerâs âNew York Trilogyâ the uncanny could refer to the doubling effect and the terror or uneasy feeling it causes the reader. In Ghosts, Blue spies on Black and as Blueâs uncanny similarities to Black become clearer throughout the story, both Blue and the reader start to feel a little confused and uncomfortable. He feels uneasy because he feels like he has seen Black somewhere before, but he canât figure out where. As he spends hours every day doing nothing but watching Black, he starts to realize that he and Black are basically the same person, or doubles of one another. The uncanny is what makes this story so interesting, yet also quite disturbing.
I also thought that the passage about childrenâs fear over losing their eyes was interesting and, of course, in typical Freud fashion, he has to relate it to castration. He writes, âThe study of dreams, fantasies and myths has taught us also that anxiety about oneâs eyes, the fear of going blind, is quite often a substitute for the fear of castrationâ (Freud 139). I had never heard of the âcastration complexâ before (or maybe I blocked it out of my mind), but I suppose I can understand it. I donât have a neurotic fear of losing my eyes or other organs, but I certainly wouldnât want to lose them if I had a choice. I thought it was interesting how he connects the castration complex and the fear of losing oneâs eyes with the story âThe Sandman.â He writes, âWe would therefore venture to trace back the uncanny element in the Sand-Man to the anxiety caused by the infantile castration complexâ (Freud 140). I tend to think that the majority of Freudâs theories that I have learned about are pretty out there and hard to come on board with, but his arguments nonetheless always serve as interesting topics of discussion at school. I donât know if his theories would make good family dinner conversation, however.













