The Uncanny

The Uncanny, published in 1919, is one of the most famous of Sigmund Freud’s essays. This is not only because many of his most foundational ideas had their genesis here but because the essay pertains to aesthetics and popular culture, making it both accessible and gripping for a broad readership. The Uncanny is a good example of Freud’s predilection for drawing on aesthetics to support his arguments, and thus a useful introduction to the ideas of this vastly influential thinker. It is also in The Uncanny that Freud sets out some of the most radical tenets of his thought: the primacy of the unconscious and the recurrence of repressed material from childhood.

The Uncanny is also a seminal text in the canon of literary criticism, and an extremely useful codex for any student of literature. Freud’s ideas about literature strongly inform almost any example of contemporary literary criticism that one reads. Although he claims at the beginning of the title essay that he “rarely” dabbles in aesthetics, literature is foundational to Freud’s theories of the structure of the human psyche. There are few texts that so compellingly make the case for literature as a route into the deepest parts of the self.