Facing the Truth about Ourselves

Abstract

There is something about ‘uncanny’ experiences that arouses people and produces in them a mixture of shivering pleasure and anxiety. It is not completely clear why this is so, why for instance the appearance of something uncanny might be more disturbing than any other unexpected event, or why it might also exert a pull that draws people in. In some ways, an encounter with the uncanny ought to be unequivocally distressing, calling into question the assumptions we use to make ourselves secure. The uncanny suggests the existence of something odd that we have not noticed before, something that undermines the unattended-to foundations on which we stand. The uncanny is often particularly unnerving because it seems so close to home, so familiar, yet also fundamentally different — like the reversal of right and left in the mirror, or the way it might gradually dawn on us that a person we are talking to is not quite in her or his ‘right mind’.