Let us journey back to the time of Dr. Freud in 1919 – A lamp sits on a table in an ordinary room. The lamp rises, but there is something wrong about the lamp. This is the peculiar force of the uncanny, where it is not an ugly event. It is ugliness of situation, which represents a defect in order. Here, the lamp remains a familiar object, but its place in the world has shifted. We are disturbed because the world still asks to be trusted, while one event inside it refuses the natural law by which we understand rooms, objects, and ourselves.
Dr. S. Freud, writing in 1919, gave this disturbance its modern psychological form. The uncanny, for him, was the strange. Many strange things do not frighten us. The uncanny is stranger than strangeness because it feels half remembered. It is the return of something hidden, something that should have remained buried but has come back into view. Schelling had already defined the uncanny in this way. Ernst Jentsch called it a form of “intellectual uncertainty,” a condition in which the mind cannot decide what it is seeing. We can see this in the art movement of the surreal.
That uncertainty often appears at the boundary between the living and the lifeless. Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’ gives Freud his central example – the adult enchanted by Olimpia, a beautiful woman who is really an automaton. The doll that may be alive, the face that may be human, the body that may be a machine, all unsettle us because they occupy two categories at once. The mind wants a border, and the object refuses one. Such themes are reemerging in 2026 with the rise of so-called AI language models.
Fairy tales show many more examples. A wolf in a story may not frighten a child. But a wolf imagined at night, just outside the window, is another matter. The marvelous belongs to worlds where supernatural events are accepted as part of the order. The fantastic appears where the order is rational, where miracles are no longer expected, and where the impossible therefore enters as a violation. A puppet that speaks inside a fairy tale belongs to its world. A puppet that speaks in our room wounds ours.
The same logic governs ghosts, doubles, vampires, and haunted houses. The ghost is not terrifying simply because it is dead. If the shroud moves, if the face flickers in uncertain light, if the dead seem to carry some remainder of life, then the boundary breaks. The ghost becomes a defect in the understanding between life and death.
The double is perhaps more troubling. In ancient images, the double could promise survival, a form by which the self endured. In modern literature, from Gogol and Poe to Dostoevsky, the double becomes a warning. Another person bears our form, occupies our place, perhaps knows something about us that we do not know ourselves. We are not frightened by difference alone. We are frightened by resemblance that has become uncanny.
Kafka showed this in Metamorphosis. The terror is not only that Gregor Samsa wakes as an insect, it is that his family adapts to the violation with an embarrassed practicality. The impossible has occurred, yet the household continues. The scandal is absorbed into routine, the world does not collapse, and it accommodates the grotesque.
That is the deepest form of the uncanny. Not the scream, not the apparition, not the supernatural event, but the discovery that disorder can enter ordinary life and be treated as normal. The uncanny begins when the lamp rises from the table. The uncanny becomes serious when everyone in the room decides, quietly, that this is how lamps have always behaved.
References
- Jentsch, E., “On the Psychology of the Uncanny (1906),” R. Sellars, Trans., Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 7–16, 1997.
- Freud, S., “The ‘Uncanny,’” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17, J. Strachey, Trans. London, U.K.: Hogarth Press, 1955, pp. 217–256.
- Windsor, M., “What is the Uncanny?,” The British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 59, no. 1, pp. 51–65, 2019.
- Schlipphacke, H., “The Place and Time of the Uncanny,” Pacific Coast Philology, vol. 50, no. 2, pp. 163–172, 2015.
- Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, J. and Clasen, M., “Creepiness and the Uncanny,” Style, vol. 57, no. 3, pp. 322–349, 2023.
- Gray, K. and Wegner, D. M., “Feeling Robots and Human Zombies: Mind Perception and the Uncanny Valley,” Cognition, vol. 125, no. 1, pp. 125–130, 2012.
- Rosenkranz, K., Aesthetics of Ugliness: A Critical Edition, A. Pop and M. Widrich, Eds. and Trans. London, U.K.: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.