Creepy

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The Uncanny ( English uncanny , French inquiétant, l'inquiétante étrangeté ) than feeling the shock Stick , fear and horror not limited to the exciting range of aesthetic experience, but troubled man as disturbing irritation often in everyday situations.

Theories

Ernst Jentsch

Ernst Jentsch explains the feeling of the uncanny through intellectual insecurity in relation to the strange and unfamiliar. The typical case for him is the doubt about the animated nature of an apparently living being and, conversely, the doubt about whether an inanimate object is not animated after all. According to Jentsch, the most certain way of producing the feeling of the uncanny in literature is that the author leaves the reader in the dark as to whether he is looking at a living person or an automaton in a certain form; Jentsch refers to the figure of the seemingly animated doll Olimpia in ETA Hoffmann's story The Sandman .

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud's essay The Unheimliche remained groundbreaking for the current discussion, although the founder of psychoanalysis was hardly familiar with the aesthetic debate about the sublime, terrible, ugly and grotesque.

Freud objects to Jentsch that the uncanny is not only the unfamiliar, but also the familiar - for Freud, that which is unfamiliar and familiar at the same time is uncanny.

He understands the feeling of the uncanny as a certain form of fear, and he attributes this fear to two sources: the return of the repressed and the revival of an understanding of reality that has been overcome.

  • A repressed idea is, for example, the castration fantasy. In Hoffmann's story Der Sandmann , tearing out the eyes, according to Freud, awakens the repressed castration idea and thus creates the feeling of the uncanny.
  • An understanding of reality that has been overcome is, for example, the conviction that mere wishing is capable of bringing about changes in reality. This infantile belief in reality is not repressed, but overcome, so it is not in the state of "repression", but of "being overcome". If remnants of this belief have been preserved, it can seemingly be confirmed by certain situations and this evokes the feeling of uncanny. Freud cites as an example a patient who, through an alleged rival, said he might be hit, and who learned a fortnight later that the other had indeed suffered a stroke; for the patient this was an "eerie" experience.

For Freud, the uncanny is what was once familiar, such as an infantile wish or childlike belief in the omnipotence of thoughts. This familiar was repressed or overcome and remained hidden in the unconscious . It returns in an alienated form in uncanny experiences and ideas. The fearful character of the uncanny is based on the fact that the affect of every emotion is transformed into fear through repression. "The prefix 'un' on this word is the mark of repression."

Freud distinguishes the uncanny that one experiences from the uncanny that one merely imagines or that one reads from, and what interests him most in the imagined uncanny is fiction in the form of fantasy and poetry. The explanation of the uncanny applies to experience without exception: the return of the repressed and the revival of a belief in reality that has been overcome in any case lead to the feeling of the uncanny. However, the uncanny experienced encompasses far fewer cases than the uncanny, which is based on fiction.

In the realm of fiction, the return of the repressed also, without exception, evokes an eerie feeling. However, this is different with the apparent confirmation of a belief in reality that has been overcome. For example, a fairy tale that tells of the omnipotence of wishing is by no means scary, and not because it left the ground of reality from the start. Fictional events only become uncanny when the poet initially appears to have placed himself on the ground of reality; only then does a "dispute over judgment" arise as to whether the credible that has been overcome is not really possible after all, and this conflict is the condition for the emergence of the feeling of uncanny.

The etymology of the word 'uncanny' suits the Freudian analysis, and so he puts its linguistic-historical origin aside for his psychological considerations. 'Unheimlich' develops as the opposite of the common Germanic word heim and its meaning of ' house ', ' residence ', ' home '. In addition to this meaning in the sense of what belongs and is familiar to the house, the word 'secret' from the beginning also points to the hidden retreat into the house and thus to a secret .

Rudolf Otto and Martin Heidegger

The theologian Rudolf Otto regards the uncanny as a raw, as yet unreflected form of the frightening feeling (mysterium tremendum), which, in addition to the fascination that emanates from the sacred , constitutes an irreducible part of the experience of the divine.

The philosopher Martin Heidegger distinguishes the concrete fear of the basic state of fear, the in person not before something specific fears , but with the Nothing and Nowhere its existence reason is confronted. Heidegger understands the fearful uncanny as an existential feeling of not being at home in the world.

The uncanny in art and popular culture

In the literature z. B. ETA Hoffmann , Edgar Allan Poe and Franz Kafka masters in giving their stories a suggestively eerie atmosphere. In the visual arts, Johann Heinrich Füssli , Arnold Böcklin or A. Paul Weber can be named, among his contemporaries the photographer Gregory Crewdson . An example from music is the composition A Night on Bald Mountain by Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky .

As a medium that unites various arts, film cites motifs of the uncanny in a complex way. Many directors use the motifs and mechanisms of the uncanny in their works, for example in the form of horror films and 'crooked' sounding melodies . Filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock or David Lynch deal in their films with the hybridity of the familiar and the unknown, which underlies the aesthetics of the uncanny. The protective home into which the foreign invades or in which it is hidden, the well-known and yet foreign doppelganger , are motifs that have found their way into pop culture as the aesthetic of the uncanny, as already described by Sigmund Freud in his fundamental essay.

The uncanny as a spatial phenomenon

In recent research, theorists have pointed to the specific spatial aspects of the uncanny. Architectural historian Anthony Vidler has explored the discomfort and feeling of the uncanny in modern architecture in his books The Architectural Uncanny and Warped Space . His criticism is directed towards the impossibility of modern architecture to fulfill the longing for home. Based on the spatial metaphors of Freud and Lacan, the cultural scientist Johannes Binotto postulates the uncanny as a fundamentally spatial phenomenon in his book TAT / ORT . It is not certain figures or motifs that are scary per se, but rather their spatial constellation. Topological constructions such as the Möbius strip or the Klein bottle present the uncanny as a state of disturbing, spatial disorientation. According to Binotto, these topologies of the uncanny can be found long before psychoanalysis in the artifacts of culture, such as the architectural studies by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the stories by Edgar Allan Poe , HP Lovecraft or Charlotte Perkins Gilman or the films by Fritz Lang and Dario Argento already anticipated or continued.

See also

Wiktionary: uncanny  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sigmund Freud: The uncanny . In: Ders .: Study edition, Vol. IV. Psychological writings. Ed. V. Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards, James Strachey. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1982, pp. 241-274, here: p. 271
  2. ↑ Ibid., P. 267.
  3. ↑ Ibid., P. 272.

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