IV

Freud's essay "The Uncanny," published in 1919, is an attempt to find a psychoanalytic explanation for the strange blend of familiarity and "creeping dread" so important to nineteenth-century German writers. Characteristically, Freud does not end up with one explanation, but with several: (1) the uncanny occurs when one encounters "something familiar and old-established in the mind that has been estranged" by repression;^[41] (2) the uncanny occurs when events conform to infantile forms of thought that have supposedly been surmounted in adulthood; (3) the uncanny occurs whenever something

[41] Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny," in Freud, Studies in Parapsychology , ed. Philip Rieff (New York, 1963), 47.

reminds one of a compulsion to repeat that operates as a basic principle in the unconscious. Freud's arguments are fascinating, and they have generated a substantial critical literature.^[42] For present purposes, however, since my focus is on illocution, I will say no more on this topic. Only one more aspect of "The Uncanny" as a locutionary text is indispensable here, and that is its official illocutionary aura: an attitude of clinical, rigorous, scientific detachment. Freud approaches the question of the uncanny from the outside, stating at the outset:

The writer of the present contribution, indeed, must himself plead guilty to a special obtuseness in [this] matter, where extreme delicacy of perception would be more in place. It is long since he has experienced or heard of anything which has given him an uncanny impression, and he will be obliged to translate himself into that state of feeling, and to awaken in himself the possibility of it before he proceeds.^[43]

The use of the third person sounds a little suspicious (with good reason, as we shall see), but the unusual clumsiness of Freud's prose here certainly measures the effort he makes to assume a detached position.

A similar measure can be taken from Freud's way of introducing his topic. After a preliminary discussion of some esthetic theories, he launches into a close philological examination of the word uncanny , involving pages of quotation from dictionaries. This is Wissenschaft with a vengeance! Once the philological survey is completed, however, Freud's text is cross-grained, even dominated, by uncanny narratives large and small, most notably by that of E. T. A. Hoffmann's tale "The Sandman," which Freud submits to a searching analysis. Three of the remaining narratives are of special interest. All of them are autobiographical, but unlike similar narratives (and dreams) in Freud's other texts, these are not used analytically. Only one of them is interpreted, and that in the scantiest of terms. Another draws

[42] My own account is indebted primarily to Neil Hertz's "Freud and the Sandman," in The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York, 1985), 97–121; and Bernard Rubin, "Freud and Hoffmann: 'The Sandman,'" in Introducing Psychoanalytic Theory , ed. Sander Gilman (New York, 1982), 205–17.

[43] Freud, "The Uncanny," 20.

attention to this interpretive inertia by brushing off its topic as "thoroughly silly" and letting it drop. On the face of it, the stories are just . . . stories. But why, we might ask, is the detached scientific person who occupies the author-position suddenly becoming a raconteur?

A look at the three narratives quickly supplies a first answer. All three contradict Freud's claim about not being subject to uncanny experiences; they reunite him with the uncanny, make him the victim/hero of an uncanny tale like "The Sandman." In the first two cases, this reunion also involves an encounter with the kind of sexual ambivalence that psychoanalysis is intended to master. In story no. 1, Freud finds himself lost in the red-light district of a small Italian town. He tries to hurry away but "involuntarily" keeps coming back to his starting point, where the prostitutes suggestively appear in the windows of the small houses. Story no. 2 is a metastory. "In the midst of the isolation of war-time," writes Freud,

 . . . I read a story about a young married couple, who move into a furnished flat in which there is a curiously shaped table with carvings of crocodiles on it. Towards evening they begin to smell an intolerable and very typical odour that pervades the whole flat; things begin to get in their way and trip them up in the darkness . . . —in short, we are given to understand that the presence of the table causes ghostly crocodiles to haunt the place, or that the wooden monsters come to life in the dark, or something of that sort. It was a thoroughly silly story, but the uncanny feeling it produced was quite remarkable.^[44]

It does not take a Freud to put together the key elements here—a young married couple, a swampy miasma, animal movements in the dark, the evasive "something of that sort"—to detect an ambivalent fantasy about unrestrained ("primordial" African or Egyptian) sexuality.

To some extent, Freud's use of these narratives overcomes the ambivalence they imply; he favors them, "involuntarily" returns to the sexual scene, fantasizes himself as a participant or a voyeur rather than as a scientific observer. But more than erotic nostalgia is in-

[44] Ibid., 50–51.

volved in Freud's reunion with the uncanny. Story no. 3, which requires full quotation, makes this clear:

[It] is interesting to observe what the effect is of suddenly and unexpectedly meeting one's own image. E. Mach has related [such an] observation. . . . [He] formed a very unfavourable opinion about [a] supposed stranger who got into [an] omnibus, and thought, "What a shabby-looking school-master that is getting on now." —I can supply a similar experience. I was sitting alone in my wagon-lit compartment when a more than usually violent jerk of the train swung back the door of the adjoining washing-cabinet, and an elderly gentleman in a dressing-gown and travelling cap came in. I assumed that he had been about to leave the washing-cabinet which divides the two compartments, and had taken the wrong direction and come into my compartment by mistake. Jumping up with the intention of putting him right, I at once realized to my dismay that the intruder was nothing but my own reflection in the looking-glass of the open door. I can still recollect that I thoroughly disliked his appearance.^[45]

Perhaps the most striking feature of these twinned narratives is the disagreeableness of the double that confronts their narrators: first a shabby schoolmaster, then an unpleasant-looking old fellow in a cap and bathrobe. In his brief interpretive comment, Freud treats these images as equivalents. By doing likewise, we can both explain their value for him and clarify the antagonism between erotic nostalgia and scientific detachment. In failing at first to recognize their doubles, both Freud and Mach split their egos in excess of the conventional doppelgänger scenario. By also disliking their doubles, the two reluctant visionaries also reject one half-self in favor of another. Taken as a composite, the rejected half bears the signs of detached intellectual rigor (he is a schoolmaster), of cultural authority (he is an elderly gentleman, a patriarch, in emphatic possession of a private compartment), and of propriety (he is properly dressed upon his exit from the bathroom). In other words, the rejected double projects an equation of intellectual rigor with the law that demands deference for old men and the prohibition that keeps the body fully (if shabbily) covered and separates bodily functions from pleasure. Freud's other-voiced

[45] Ibid., 54n –56n .

narratives can be taken to rebel against this (implicitly paternal) Law: hence the link of his erotic narratives to license and primitive nature, the brothel and the jungle. Freud's involvement of Ernst Mach in this scenario is especially telling. Mach was the most influential proponent of scientific positivism in Freud's Vienna; for Mach to start seeing doubles makes positivism a shade less than positive.

Still deeper motives become apparent if we look at the elderliness of Freud's double in another light. In most cases, the double or doppelgänger is a "ghastly harbinger of death."^[46] The elderly gentleman who intrudes into Freud's compartment after a stroke of violence suggests something similar even before he is (consciously) recognized as a double. When Freud first jumps up from his seat, his impulse is to throw the old man out—to cast out death. When the old man proves to be his double, he masters the dread this elicits in the form of dislike. The dread, as he observes, becomes only "a vestigial trace of that . . . reaction which feels the double to be something uncanny."^[47] To deny the Law, then, is also to deny death. Far more than for sexual fantasy, Freud returns to the uncanny in order to master it, to appropriate its power in order to go on living.

This reading finds its most striking confirmation in one last other-voiced narrative, this time a displaced one. Apropos, more or less, of nothing, Freud at one point introduces a special version of the uncanny:

If we come across the number 62 several times in a single day, or if we begin to notice that everything which has a number—addresses, hotel-rooms, compartments [NB] in railway-trains—always has the same one . . . [we] feel this to be 'uncanny,' and unless a man is utterly hardened and proof against the lure of superstition he will be tempted to ascribe a secret meaning to this obstinate recurrence of a number, taking it, perhaps, as an indication of the span of life allotted to him.^[48]

This passage wryly acts out a familiar pose: "Doctor, I have this friend . . ."; it is perfectly clear that the man who fears the number sixty-two is Freud himself. But why bring the subject up?

[46] Ibid., 40.

[47] Ibid., 56n .

[48] Ibid., 43.

The answer begins in the 1890s, when Freud, working at white heat to lay the foundations of psychoanalysis, was deeply dependent on the emotional support offered by his friend Wilhelm Fliess.^[49] Fliess theorized that human life was governed by something resembling what we call biorhythms. One conclusion he drew from this was that Freud would probably die at the age of fifty-one. In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life , first published in 1901, Freud comments indirectly on this prediction:

I find I have a[n unconscious] tendency to superstition [about numbers], whose origin is still unknown to me myself. I usually come upon speculations about the duration of my own life and the lives of those dear to me; and the fact that my friend in B[erlin] has made the periods of human life the subject of his calculations . . . must have acted as a determinant of this unconscious juggling. I am not now in agreement with one of the premises from which this work of his proceeds; from highly egotistic motives I should be very glad to carry my point against him, and yet I appear to be imitating his calculations in my own way.^[50]

In 1907, when the book entered its third edition and its author turned fifty-one in good health, Freud changed the phrase "is still unknown to me myself" to "for long remained unknown to me" and deleted the rest. Freud had indeed carried his point, and capped it by making the whole argument disappear. He cheated death and triumphed over superstition—while still, as his editorial vanishing act shows, remaining susperstitious in his own way.

Unfortunately for Freud, the age of fifty-one was not the last stop on Fliess's schedule; sixty-two came after it. In May 1919, Freud picked up an old mansucript and began to rework it into the essay we know as "The Uncanny." His first public acknowledgment of the essay appears in a letter dated May 12—six days after his sixty-third birthday . In a gesture that is uncanny by one of his own definitions, Freud carries his point against Fliess for a second time. Having triumphed over superstition and lived, he returns once more to the

[49] On this topic see Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York, 1988), 55–63.

[50] Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life , trans. Alan Tyson (New York, 1965), 250n .

realm of the supernatural in order to act out his mastery over it. As illocution, "The Uncanny" as a whole performs successfully the symbolic action that Freud's narrative of the unrecognized double is forced to curtail: it casts out death.

Freud's other-voicedness in "The Uncanny" is strikingly like Beethoven's in "La malinconia" in its overall effect, although the specific resemblance is less important than the larger recurrence of other-voiced discourse itself. Nonetheless, Beethoven's mutual dislocation of nature and technique is reenacted in Freud's parallel dislocation of superstition and science. Freud's "superstition" is situated (at times explicitly) in the natural world as it appears to a prerational mind; his "science" represents the transformation of that world by the techniques and instruments of rational knowledge. Like Beethoven at the close of the Allegretto, Freud invites—or cannot prevent—the return of irrational (subjective, unconscious, natural) materials upon a discourse, a technique, that is meant to demystify them. In both the music and the essay, what Freud calls "obstinate recurrence" marks an effort to master the nagging persistence of subjective intensities. The result, in both cases, is a vertiginous shuttling between the principle of melencolia significa ingegno and its contrary: that ingegno is not the signified of melencolia but its cure.