Abstract
[In his famous essay on the uncanny, first published in 1919,2 Sigmund Freud begins by complaining that aesthetics has hitherto not paid much attention to the aberrant and the repulsive. This complaint is also an expression of anticipatory pleasure on the part of Freud the writer, in so far as the uncanny in particular has no ‘literature’ with which to contend — but he has to admit that there is one exception, namely the essay translated below.3 Jentsch emphasises that the uncanny arises from a certain experience of the uncertain or undecidable, and this seems intolerable to Freud. Freud decides, in other words, that the undecidable cannot be tolerated as a theoretical explanation, but it nonetheless recurs in his own essay, undecidably.4 He also pays close attention to Jentsch’s argument about the uncanniness of automata.5
‘Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen’ was published in the Psychiatrisch-Neurologische Wochenschrift 8.22 (25 Aug. 1906): pp. 195–8 and 8.23 (1 Sept. 1906): pp. 203–5 (the bibliographical references in the Freud editions do not make it clear that Jentsch’s essay is spread over two separate issues of the weekly). As far as I can tell, the German text has never been reprinted.
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Notes
Sigmund Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth, 1955), pp. 217–56; or in The Pelican Freud Library, vol. 14, trans. James Strachey, ed. Albert Dickson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), pp. 335–76. For Freud’s German text, see the Gesammelte Werke, vol. 12, ed. Anna Freud et al. (London: Imago, 1947), pp. 227–68; or the Studienausgabe, vol. 4, ed. Alexander Mitscherlich et al. (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1970), pp. 241–74.
See Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, pp. 226–7 and 233. For more on Freud’s Jentsch, see the definitive study by Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 39–42 and 52.
Ernst Jentsch, Die Laune: Eine ärztlich -psychologische Studie, Grenzfragen des Nerven- und Seelenlebens 15 (Wiesbaden: Bergmann, 1902); this is the series in which Freud’s Über den Traum (1901) had first appeared.
Ernst Jentsch, Musik und Nerven, vol. 1, Naturgeschichte des Tonsinns, Grenzfragen des Nerven- und Seelenlebens 29 (Wiesbaden: Bergmann, 1904); vol. 2, Das musikalische Gefühl, Grenzfragen des Nerven- und Seelenlebens 78 (Wiesbaden: Bergmann, 1911). On the uncanny in music, see
Richard Cohn, ‘Uncanny Resemblances: Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 57.2 (2004): pp. 285–323.
Forbes Morlock, ‘Doubly Uncanny: An Introduction to “On the Psychology of the Uncanny”’, Angelaki 2.1 (1995): pp. 17–21.
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Collins, J., Jervis, J. (2008). Document: ‘On the Psychology of the Uncanny’ (1906): Ernst Jentsch. In: Collins, J., Jervis, J. (eds) Uncanny Modernity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230582828_12
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