AN UNCANNY HOME AND A HOME
IN THE UNCANNY: THE MOTHER'S BODY
AND THE AFTERLIFE

Freud's texts “The Uncanny” and The Future of an Illusion contain further evidence of an attempt to analyze this set of intertwined fears and fantasies. These texts present a set of images linking the maternal body and the afterlife through a common association with the uncanny. They also move hesitantly toward an interpretation of these images and their interconnections.

The essay “The Uncanny” (“Das Unheimliche”), published shortly before Beyond the Pleasure Principle and “set against a background of war, death, the death instinct” (Kofman 1991: 123), illustrates with particular clarity Freud's two theses in tension: an Oedipal master plot persistently interrupted and undercut by a non-Oedipal counterthesis. Many theorists have pointed out contradictions in the structure and development of “The Uncanny.” Hélène Cixous, for example, describes the “text and its hesitating shadow,” noting that “what is brought together here is quickly undone, what asserts itself becomes suspect; each thread leads to its net or to some kind of disentanglement” (1976: 525).

In “The Uncanny,” Freud explored the realm of the experiences that arouse dread and horror. He offered a linguistic analysis of the term “uncanny,” an interpretation of a story, “The Sand-Man,” by E. T. A. Hoffmann, a “collection of examples” further illustrating the feeling of

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the uncanny (SE 17: 245), and a metapsychological analysis of the source of this feeling. Freud's linguistic analysis of the uncanny reveals the ambiguity of the word itself. While the word unheimlich means “strange” and “uncanny,” the word heimlich can refer to either the familiar and agreeable or to what is hidden, concealed, kept out of sight, unfamiliar, and strange: “Among its different shades of meaning, the word ‘heimlich’ exhibits one which is identical with its opposite, ‘unheimlich’. What is heimlich thus comes to be unheimlich … everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light” (224–25). He explains further that what is heimlich“develops in the direction of ambivalence until it Wnally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich” (226).

This linguistic analysis establishes the foundation for Freud's interpretation of Hoffmann's “Sand-Man” and other sites of the uncanny. The linguistic ambivalence of the word, he argues, echoes a psychological ambivalence. Long-abandoned ideas which reemerge after having been repressed will generate a sense of the uncanny: “We can understand why linguistic usage has extended das Heimliche … into its opposite, das Unheimliche; for this uncanny is in 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” (SE 17: 241). These long-abandoned ideas, however, are quite specific. The dominant thesis Freud develops and pursues is that the uncanny emerges from the return of repressed castration fears. Interrupting this thesis is a counterthesis in which the uncanny emerges from the return of repressed ideas associating death, the mother, and immortality.

Hoffmann's tale “The Sand-Man,” a central piece of Freud's analysis of the uncanny, is a complex story involving a young man's childhood memories and fears, his love for two young women, his conflicts with father Wgures, and his insanity and suicide. Three central moments of the story stand out in Freud's retelling and interpretation.

First, a set of childhood memories: as a child, the young Nathaniel

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was occasionally sent to bed early after being told by his mother that the “Sand-Man” was coming. His nurse explained that this wicked man would throw sand into the eyes of children who refuse to go to bed, steal their bleeding eyes, and feed the eyes to his own bird-children who would use their hooked, owl-like beaks to peck and eat the eyes of the naughty boys and girls (SE 17: 228). Undeterred by these warnings and determined to observe the Sand-Man, Nathaniel hid in his father's study one night. He saw his father working with a guest, Coppelius, at a brazier with glowing Xames. The child heard Coppelius call out: “Eyes here! Eyes here!” (228). He screamed aloud, revealing his presence. Coppelius attempted to burn the child's eyes, but he was saved by his father. The trauma led to a long illness for the child. A year later, an explosion killed Nathaniel's father while he was again working in his study with Coppelius.

In the second major narrative moment, Nathaniel, now an older student, sees a double of Coppelius—“Coppola”—selling spyglasses or spectacles. He buys one, and while using it, sees through a window a beautiful, but silent woman, Olympia, with whom he falls violently and obsessively in love. Olympia, he later discovers, is an automaton created by her “father” and Coppola. A struggle ensues between Nathaniel and Olympia's creators, during which her eyes fall out. Coppola carries offthe eyeless, wooden doll. The “father” picks up Olympia's bleeding eyes from the ground and throws them at Nathaniel, saying that Coppola had stolen them from the student. Nathaniel “succumbs to a fresh attack of madness” (229). Crying out “spin about, ring of fire … wooden doll, spin about,” Nathaniel tries to strangle Olympia's “father.”

In the third central moment, having recovered from madness, Nathaniel is engaged to Clara, a clever and sensible young woman. They climb the high tower of the town hall. Looking through Coppola's spyglass, he falls into a new attack of madness. Crying out “Ring of fire, spin about!” he attempts to throw Clara from the tower. Rescued by her brother, Clara descends, while Nathaniel, having

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caught sight of Coppelius/Coppola, shrieks “Wne eyes, Wne eyes,” and Xings himself over the parapet to his death. Freud ends his summary of the narrative with the words “While he lies on the paving stones with a shattered skull, the Sand-Man vanishes in the throng” (230).

Freud's interpretation emphasizes Oedipal and castrative themes. The “arbitrary and meaningless” elements in the story, he argues, “become intelligible as soon as we replace the Sand-Man by the dreaded father at whose hands castration is expected” (232). He emphasizes the castration anxiety underlying the fear of blindness, recalling Oedipus's self-punishment: “Anxiety about one's eyes, the fear of going blind, is often enough a substitute for the dread of being castrated. The selfblinding of the mythical criminal, Oedipus, was simply a mitigated form of the punishment of castration—the only punishment that was adequate for him by the lex talionis” (231). The Sand-Man, in Freud's view, generates a feeling of uncanniness because of the return of the repressed castration complex: “We shall venture therefore to refer the uncanny effect of the Sand-Man to the anxiety belonging to the castration complex of childhood” (233).

Alongside his castrative theory, Freud presents, but rejects, an alternative interpretation. He describes an analysis of the story and its uncanniness by a turn-of-the-century theorist, E. Jentsch, in which the uncanny is said to depend on the “intellectual uncertainty” over whether an object is alive or not, an uncertainty emerging “when an inanimate object becomes too much like an animate one” (233). Acknowledging that the ambiguous qualities of the doll/woman Olympia—alive and not alive, animate and inanimate—would seem to support Jentsch's view, he nevertheless argues that this ambiguity plays a negligible role in evoking the uncanny effect: “Jentsch's point of an intellectual uncertainty has nothing to do with the effect. Uncertainty whether an object is living or inanimate, which admittedly applied to the doll Olympia, is quite irrelevant in connection with this other more striking instance of uncanniness” (230).

Freud's rationale for dismissing the living/inanimate Olympia as the

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source of the uncanniness in the story is simply that the Sand-Man is the dominant and titular theme. The Sand-Man and the fear of castration, he claims, are the true source of the sense of uncanniness because Hoffmann's title suggests that the Sand-Man is the central focus: “The main theme of the story is … something which gives it its name and which is always reintroduced at critical moments: it is the theme of the “Sand-Man who tears out children's eyes” (227). He argues further that the author's satiric treatment of the hero's relationship to Olympia militates against attributing uncanniness to Olympia. Yet after challenging Jentsch's theory early in the essay, he returns to it again and again (227, 230, 233), as if he cannot quite dismiss it. Death, or the theme of the living/dead, animate/inanimate woman, rather than castration, seems to demand centrality.

Here, as in so many texts, Freud insists that castration anxiety is the foundational anxiety and that death anxiety is a secondary phenomenon, yet the priority of death over castration is irrepressibly expressed through textual interruptions and inconsistencies. “Everything takes place as if Freud could not bear the importance of his discovery concerning the death instincts and as if ‘The Uncanny’ with its successive invalidations, its tortuous procedure, is a last effort to conceal ‘the [real] return of the repressed [death]’” (Kofman 1991: 160).^[10]

Freud's essay thus documents a hesitant exploration of—and resistance to—the themes of the counterthesis. His compulsive returns to Jentsch's thesis represent tentative forays into the terrain where mortality, immortality, and the mother are intertwined with the uncanny. The deadly mother, present in the other texts we have examined, is obscured in this text—yet her spectral presence has not been erased entirely. The Sand-Man has deadly maternal qualities: he tears out children's eyes as food for his own little children, a hint that the story itself can be read as a fantasy concealing the fear of death at the hands of a dangerous mother. This is a story in which the mother's presence is so frightening that she is negated. Hoffmann's tale contains two central accounts of motherless procreation. The events witnessed by Nathaniel as a child

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enacted a distorted “primal scene.” And the student's encounter with the two “fathers” of Olympia provide a structural reminder of that early, motherless act of reproduction. The acts of creation occur between two men, providing a hint of the theme of homosexuality. The “primal scene” transpires at night, in private. Specific sounds are associated with it: thudding of steps coming up the stairs and “characteristic creakings” (Kofman 1991: 149). Mothers are excluded from this act of creation, while the father, playing the childbearing role, dies in an “explosion” which reenacts and transforms a fantasy of maternal death in childbirth.

In Freud's negation of the mother, in his giving the father the role of dead mother and presenting obliquely a “maternal” or nurturant Wgure associated with death through an image we encountered in the previous chapter, bird beaks, we encounter the foundational themes of the uncanny: death and the mother. “What seems to be unbearable and unheimlich is this identification with the mother and the death which she threatens; this internalization of the forbidden mother, who can be considered an analogon of the death instincts” (Kofman 1991: 162).

The sequence and development of Freud's subsequent argument in “The Uncanny,” after his discussion of “The Sand-Man,” repeats his earlier pattern of presenting, recursively, an interpretation of death and immortality, followed by a castrative text, followed, in turn, by another discussion of death and immortality. Freud describes another story by Hoffmann, “The Devil's Elixir,” focusing here upon his use of the theme of the double. His argument moves from the denial of death, to the double as a portrayal of the immortality of the soul, to the double as a defense against castration, to ancient Egyptian practices of creating doubles to promote immortality, and Wnally to the double as herald of death.

The double “was originally an insurance against the destruction of the ego, an ‘energetic denial of the power of death’ … and probably the ‘immortal’ soul was the first ‘double’ of the body” (17: 235). Eventually, he states, “from having been an assurance of immortality, [the double]

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becomes the uncanny harbinger of death” (17: 235). Thus, the double evolves from a “protection against death to death's emissary” (Lydenberg 1997: 1081). In these passages, Freud virtually collapses the theory of castration into the theory of the death instinct. Although he elsewhere attempted to maintain the primacy of castration anxiety over death anxiety, here, the two are inseparable. These texts even hint that death takes primacy over castration. But Freud stops himself before making that move. Committed as he is to the Oedipal masterplot and the castration complex, he cannot fully pursue the implications of his own insights suggesting the primacy of the death drive over the castration complex.^[11]

Three vivid images conclude the “collection of examples” in “The Uncanny”: a castration image, an image of being buried alive, and an image of the mother's genitals. The dramatic castration image illustrates the master thesis Freud propounds in this text: “Dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut offat the wrist … feet which dance by themselves … all these have something peculiarly uncanny about them.” This kind of uncanniness, he argues, “springs from its proximity to the castration complex” (SE 17: 244). Freud's penultimate example, fear of living burial, is tentatively offered and subsequently retracted in a move which itself seems to compulsively repeat a pattern we have previously observed. Freud stated, “to many people the idea of being buried alive while appearing to be dead is the most uncanny thing of all. And yet psycho-analysis has taught us that this terrifying phantasy is only a transformation of another phantasy which had originally nothing terrifying about it at all but was Wlled with a certain lustful pleasure—the phantasy, I mean, of intrauterine existence (Leben im Mutterlieb).” (CP 4: 397).^[12] The terror of death through premature burial is thus diminished or transformed into pleasure by locating its source in the fantasy of returning to the womb. What seems uncanny is actually canny, comforting, pleasant, or cozy (SE 17: 222 n. 2). Freud's proffered and retracted image simultaneously illustrates and enacts the repetition compulsion. As in “A Religious Experience,” “The Theme of

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the Three Caskets,” “Medusa's Head,” and the dream of the beaked birds, the fear of death is transformed into maternal/erotic love, death is transformed into sex, tomb transformed into womb. In what might be called a Freudian “Heimlich maneuver,” the uncanniness of death through burial is displaced onto the canniness of the mother's genitals, which in this context signify pleasure, rather than death and burial.

This leads Freud directly to his Wnal example of the uncanny. Introducing this image as “a beautiful confirmation of our theory of the uncanny” (by “our theory” he means here the theory of the source of the uncanny in the return of the repressed), he notes that, the previous example notwithstanding, male patients frequently report that “they feel there is something uncanny about the female genital organs.” He explains: “This unheimlich place however is the entrance to the former Heim of all human beings, to the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning … we may interpret the place as being mother's genitals or her body. In this case too the unheimlich is what was once heimisch, homelike, familiar, the prefix ‘un’ (un) is the token of repression” (SE 17: 245, parentheses in original).

These images inscribe a powerful circularity: Freud links the uncanny with both birth and death. Human beginnings are linked with endings. Freud's own later autobiographical remark recapitulates this cycle: “The triumph of my life lies in my having, after a long and roundabout journey, found my way back to my earliest path” (SE 20: 253). Like the Wgure of the mother who gives birth and enfolds in death in “The Theme of the Three Caskets,” these images return us to our place of origin, but leave us with an uncanny sense of alienation. The terror of premature burial is exposed as a pleasurable fantasy of returning to the mother's genitals, but the mother's genitals are in turn exposed as terrifying and uncanny. The Wnal set of images—castration, premature burial, and maternal genitals—recapitulates the tension in the overall movement of the essay: an Oedipal/castrative master thesis is interrupted by a counterthesis suggesting that death and the mother are the primary factors invoking the uncanny.^[13]

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Freud linked the uncanny to religion very directly in the linguistic portion of his essay, quoting several biblical passages and theological texts. He cites Psalms 27: “In the secret of his tabernacle he shall hide me heimlich” (SE 17: 225), and he quotes Schelling, “To veil the divine, to surround it with a certain Unheimlichkeit” (SE 17: 224). While hiding in the house of God and veiling the divine are certainly (un)heimlich, it is the idea of the afterlife which is most closely related to our theme. The unheimlich Heim, the uncanny home, appears in another text of Freud's, a text which brings us directly into contact with the theme of religion and the afterlife: The Future of an Illusion.

In this famous book, Freud criticizes three central doctrines of Western religious thought: the idea of God, the idea of a moral universe, and the idea of a blissful afterlife. He argues that these “doctrines” are illusions or wishes: “It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent Providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe, and an afterlife, but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be” (SE 21: 33). Such beliefs are direct and transparent expressions of humandesires, “fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind” (30).

Let us attend carefully to the words Freud uses to describe the psychological effect of religious notions of the presence of God and the reality of the afterlife. He describes “the painful riddle of death” and the uncertainties of life. One might suppose, he notes, that this “condition of things would result in a permanent state of anxious expectation.” However, religion assuages these anxieties, offering promises of safety, predictability, and familiarity: “If death itself is not something spontaneous but the violent act of an evil will, if everywhere in nature there are beings around us of a kind that we know in our society, then we can breathe freely, can feel at home in the uncanny [fühlt sich heimisch im Unheimlichen], and can deal by psychical means with our senseless anxiety” (SE 21: 16–17; GS 11: 424). By negating death and afirming God, religion allows us to feel “at home in the uncanny.” The words are not far

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from those he used in “The Uncanny” in describing the mother's genitals: the unheimlich Heim, the uncanny home, resonates richly with the “home in the uncanny.”

In The Future of an Illusion, religious beliefs offer a home in the uncanny, a Heim in the unheimlich, a sense of familiarity in the unfamiliar. In “The Uncanny,” the mother's body or the female genitals offer an image of an uncanny home, a sense of discomfort in the familiar. The unheimlich, uncanny, unfamiliar, maternal body is what was once heimisch or heimlich, familiar or “homey,” while the heimlich (familiar) religious universe assuages the unheimlich disorientation of existential anxiety. Heaven and the mother's genitals are uncannily linked. The first makes us feel at home in the Unheimlichkeit; the latter makes us feel unheimlich at home. Religion offers at-homeness in the uncanny; the female genitals offer uncanniness at home. Pivotal in the unheimlich Heimlichkeit of each is “the riddle of death”: religion's reconstruction of death into an illusion of a desirable afterlife is what makes it so heimlich, while the proximity of the maternal body to the symbolism of death is what makes it so unheimlich. Freud's texts delineate religion's reconstruction of the unheimlich facticity of life and death into the heimlich familiarity of God's universe. Freud's terminology exposes the presence of the maternal body in ideas about death and the afterlife.^[14]