Uncanny Dreams, Uncanny Reality

When we first started discussing the uncanny, I wasn’t very sure of how it could apply to the context of passing and race. But after getting into Freud’s article a bit more, I started seeing how the concept of the uncanny could apply to more than just nightmares and haunted houses. The uncanny refers to something secretly familiar that has undergone repression and returned from it, making it an unknown, yet familiar object. Uncanny can also refer to something “concealed, kept from sight so others do not get to know of or about it.” While uncanny deals mainly with frightening things, I think it is more than something that makes you knock in your boots. It seems like it has to do with a psychological inability to grasp the truth and accept what is before your eyes (which is where Freud and his “interesting” psychological concepts come in). Much of the uncanny material that we’ve encountered so far in this course occurs in dreams, which all turn out to be true within their own contexts but that those having them do not want to consider as truly happening.

“Uncanny”

Sigmund Freud

In “Uncanny,” S. Freud makes the claim that uncanny is that which is threatening and unfamiliar or “unheimlich,” while that which is familiar and innocuous is “heimlich;” using ‘home’ as an example of a comfort-confirming space due to its social inviolability (grounded in the constitutional legal framework of the Fourth Amendment) and the physical security it encompasses, Freud juxtaposes the home as a safe space and uncanny as other than or foreign to the home.

That which is ‘uncanny’ is necessarily destabilizing and threatening, as per say the intrusion of a foreign individual into our home or the presence of an infection in our internal apparatus. In this specific analysis, home and body become interchangeable terms for “heimlich.”

When something is amiss in the regular structure and/or working of things, the body or individual’s immediate response is recognition of the unfamiliar intruder. Followed closely by a suppressing reaction aimed at inoculating the disturbance and/or infringement, such as calling the police, visiting the doctor for antibiotics, etc.

For example:

Henry Heimlich honors his surname with his invention of the popularly known Heimlich maneuver which attempts to free the airway of the physical obstruction of a foreign body by way of abdominal thrusts. This foreign object, necessarily caustic, comes from outside the body and triggers a feeling of uncanniness in its destabilizing effect, impairing regular breathing, and potentially fatal consequence.

Therefore, Henry Heimlich’s maneuver, illustrates the attempt at ensuring or securing the normalcy or integrity of “heimlich,” the home or body.

Prisons, secluding violators of society’s laws, serve as interesting examples of society’s response to visually/physically seclude the threat of “heimlich” embodied by the prisoners. The fear that society will be contaminated or that the feeling of uncanniness will spread throughout society often results in the physical remoteness or peripheral location of these institutions. The act of creating or maintaining a safe distance from threats mirrors a historical biological defense and preservation tactic the human body devised in keeping away from sources of harm.

>I was about to connect this with ‘passing’ but I got distracted! and now my train of thought is lost. Anyone, is there a connection between ‘passing’ and what I wrote above?