The Unconcept: The Freudian Uncanny in Late-Twentieth-Century Theory

Chapter 2. The Position of the Uncanny in Freud’s Oeuvre

2 The Position of the Uncanny in Freud’s Oeuvre 2.1. Follow the Index? It is rather remarkable that, despite the ongoing interest in the uncanny, no systematic account of the position of the concept of the uncanny within Freud’s oeuvre is available, even though partial links to other texts and notions have, of course, been examined. This is due to several reasons: the text’s generic indeterminacy, Freud’s own relative disregard of the essay after 1921, and the general confusion between the word “uncanny” as a concept or as a common German adjective. As the editors of the recent French Freud translation point out, Freud rarely quoted the essay after 1919, even if he repeatedly used the adjective “unheimlich”: “It is important to emphasize that the word unheimlich functions in the entire oeuvre of Freud, well beyond the linguistic overdetermination revealed by Freud in ‘Das Unheimliche.’” (Bourguignon e.a. 1989, 109, my trans.)1 One may indeed wonder to what extent “unheimlich” can be considered a full-fledged concept within Freud’s thought. A quick examination of a number of bibliographical instruments is surprisingly inconsistent when it comes to the keyword “unheimlich.” The index of the Studienausgabe alphabetically lists the main entries and references for the texts per volume.2 Four of the ten volumes include an entry to the substantivized adjective “Unheimliche, das,” one of which is obviously the fourth volume, Psychologische Schriften (Psychological Writings), which contains the essay. Both in the first volume that contains Freud’s Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1916–1917) and the New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1933a), as well as in the fifth volume, Sexualleben (Sexual Life), the adjective is used in the context of anxiety, without however announcing the 17 18 The Unconcept essay. In volume IX, Fragen der Gesellschaft und Religion (Questions about Society and Religion), no less than seven references are found: in Totem and Taboo (1912–1913) there is a crossreference to “The ‘Uncanny’” (Freud 1912–1913, 43) and Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921c) contains the clearest reference to the essay after 1919: “Let us recall that hypnosis has something positively uncanny about it; but the character of uncanniness suggests something old and familiar that has undergone repression” (Freud 1921c, 125). Except for one mention of the adjective in Moses and Monotheism (1939a), the Studienausgabe’s index only encloses references to the substantivized adjective “das Unheimliche” and is therefore not complete. The index to the Standard Edition includes three main entries related to “uncanny”: “Uncanniness,” “Uncanny, the,” and “Uncanny, sense of, in obsessional neurosis.” Most of the references are to “The Uncanny.” The first keyword, “Uncanniness (of coincidence),” contains two references to Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. The substantivized adjective “Uncanny, the” (without further specification of added keywords) refers to Totem and Taboo, Five Lectures on PsychoAnalysis (1910a), to the introductory lecture on anxiety (1916–17), and to The Future of an Illusion (1927c). The third keyword refers to the case of the Rat Man (1909d). In 1993, Dany Nobus compiled an extensive bibliographical repertory of the use of “unheimlich” by Freud in an explicit effort to fill in the lacunae in the indexes of the Studienausgabe, the Gesamtausgabe, and the Standard Edition.3 Nobus chronologically lists twenty-eight texts by Freud that contain the word “unheimlich,” usually adding a few words to situate the adjective in its context. In some cases, the link to “The Uncanny” is quite straightforward and acceptable. The occurrences of the term may be considered as precursors or as more or less explicit references to the essay, depending on the time of writing. However, in just as many other cases, there are no indications that the use goes beyond the common meaning of the adjective.4 Nobus’s attitude toward the usage of the word in several essays that are indirectly related to the topic is ambivalent.5 In their introduction to the Dutch translation of the story “Inexplicable” discussed in “The Uncanny,” Nobus and Quakelbeen suggest that Freud may have included the story in his text because of the literal occurrence of the word “uncanny.” If we extend this to the other (literary) examples in “The Uncanny,” Freud may have been guided by the mere presence of the word “unheimlich” on more than one occasion. This reasoning would certainly hold for Hoffmann’s association with the uncanny because the word repeatedly occurs in “The Sandman” as well as in [3.149...