Uncanny

The Uncanny (English uncanny, French inquiétant, l' inquietante étrangeté ) is not limited as a feeling of fright adherence, anxiety and terrifying to the area 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 uncertainty about the strange and the Unvertrautem. The typical case is the doubt as to the soulfulness of an apparently living being, and conversely the doubt about whether an inanimate object is not as yet inspired him. In the literature, the feeling of the uncanny, according to Jentsch, be the safest prepared by the author to the reader about an unclear if he has a specific shape in a living person or a machine in front of him; Jentsch this refers to the figure of the animated translucent doll Olympia in ETA Hoffmann's tale The Sandman.

Sigmund Freud

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

Counter Jentsch argues Freud, the uncanny is not only the unfamiliar, but also the familiar - is scary for Freud what is both unfamiliar and familiar.

He understands the feeling of the uncanny as a specific form of anxiety, and he leads this fear on two sources: the return of the repressed and the revival of a vanquished understanding of reality.

• A repressed idea is for example the castration fantasy. In Hoffmann's tale The Sandman According to Freud calls the tearing of the eyes, the repressed castration idea awake and creates the feeling of the uncanny.

• A subdued understanding of reality, for example, the belief was merely wishes to cause changes in the position, in reality. This infantile reality faith is not displaced, but overcome, not located then in a state of " displacement ", but the " About wounds one". If radicals have received this faith, it can be confirmed apparently by certain situations and this causes the feeling of the uncanny forth. Freud gives the example of a patient who expressed their supposed rivals, it may make him the blow, and a fortnight later learned that the other had actually suffered a stroke; for the patient, this was a " weird " experience.

For Freud, the uncanny is thus the once familiar, such as an infantile wish or childlike faith in the omnipotence of thoughts. This confidant was displaced or overcome and held in the unconscious hidden. In eerie experiences and ideas it returns in alienated form. The fear of the uncanny character based on the fact that the affect is any emotion transformed by the displacement in fear. " But the prefix 'un ' words in this is the brand of repression. "

Freud distinguishes the uncanny that you experience of the uncanny, which one is merely imagining or from which you read, and interested in the featured uncanny him above all the fiction in the form of imagination and poetry. For experiencing the explanation of the uncanny applies without exception: the return of the repressed and the revival of a vanquished reality of faith lead in each case to the fact that the feeling of the uncanny arises. However, the experienced uncanny includes much fewer cases than the uncanny, which is based on fiction.

In the realm of fiction, the return of the repressed calls also without exception an eerie feeling out. In apparent confirmation of a vanquished reality of faith, however, is different. For example, a tale is told in the of the omnipotence of desire, not scary, and that, therefore, not because it has left the ground of reality from the outset. Scary fictitious operations only when the poet was initially provided appears to stem from the ground of reality; only then there is a " judgment dispute" whether the subdued Credible but is not really possible, and this conflict is the condition for the emergence of a sense of eeriness.

The etymology of the word ' uncanny ' is contrary to the Freudian analysis, and he shall make its philological origin its psychological considerations aside. ' Scary ' develops as the opposite of the common Germanic word home and its meaning of ' home ', ' Location ', ' home '. In addition to this meaning in the sense of what belongs to the house and confidant, the word ' secret ' from the outset to which concealed retreat into the house and thus on a secret way.

Rudolf Otto and Martin Heidegger

The theologian Rudolf Otto considered the uncanny as raw, yet unreflective form of the scary feeling ( mysterium tremendum ), that constitutes an irreducible part of the experience of the divine in addition to the fascination of the Holy.

The philosopher Martin Heidegger distinguishes the concrete fear of the fundamental mood of anxiety, in which the man is not afraid of anything in particular, but with the Nothing and Nowhere its existence reason is confronted. The frightening uncanny grasp Heidegger as a existentiales attunement of the non- home -ness in the world.

The uncanny in art and popular culture

In the literature were for BETA Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe and Franz Kafka master is to give her stories a suggestively eerie atmosphere. In the visual arts can be Johann Heinrich Fuseli, Arnold Böcklin or A. Paul Weber mention, among the contemporaries of the photographer Gregory Crewdson. An example from the music is the composition of A Night on Bald Mountain by Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky.

As a different arts unifying medium of film leads to a complex way, motifs of the uncanny. Many directors use in their works of the motives and mechanisms of action of the uncanny, for example in the form of horror films and ' wrong ' sounding tunes. Filmmakers, like Alfred Hitchcock or David Lynch deal in their films with the hybridity of the familiar and the unknown, which is the aesthetics of the uncanny as a basis. The protective house into which the stranger enters or in which it is hidden, the familiar and yet foreign alike, are motives which are drawn into the pop culture than the aesthetics of the uncanny as it was home to Sigmund Freud describes in his seminal essay.