Discuss the "uncanny" in relation to surrealism

von: Nadine Beck

In 1919, the inventor of the psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, published his psychological essay on the “Uncanny”. He did not know that he gave the still young Surrealist movement a welcome scientific base for their subversive, new way of art. Although the “Uncanny” is only one of many means surrealism is playing with, the relation to Freud and its theories is close and essential to the movements artists. It is a key that is required to reveal the secrets of their sometimes not easily decipherable works, be it photos, sculptures or paintings. The surrealist movement saw Freud’s exploration of the “unconscious” as their legitimating of the view of the world, as for them, the reality was nothing but a fake idea whereas dreams and the unconscious state of mind inhabited the true world.

I shall depict the phenomenon of the “Uncanny” and how the surrealists used it for their purposes in this essay. Therefore, I consider it necessary to depict Freud’s psychological explanation of the “Uncanny” in full length. While comparing his essay to the works of the surrealist group, it will become clear that there is hardly any detail of the examples for the “Uncanny” given by it that is not transferred into a piece of art. Where possible, I shall give illustrations of the works mentioned, to visualize what the uncanny meant to them. However, did it mean the same to them all? How about the observer of the works? According to the fact that Freud’s “Uncanny” is psychologically related to women, and undoubtedly women play the major part in the surrealist’s works, too, how did surrealist women see it? If women are the personification of the “Uncanny“, what was the “Uncanny” for the uncanny then? There are a few surrealist women who contributed with their works to the answer of this question, but unfortunately, they did not feel the urge to explain their oeuvre to the posterity, unlike the numerous literal outpouring of their colleagues. So I shall let the pictures speak to themselves and refer to my own, female, sense for the uncanny. The “Uncanny” by Sigmund Freud:

The “Uncanny” (German: unheimlich, French: l´inquiétante, lugubre) is as a feeling of nervousness, fear and horror not limited to the field of aesthetic experience. It not rarely causes anxiety in humans as a disturbing irritation in common situations. In numerous experiments with clients, he found mutual motifs for the cause of the uncanny felling, but he also concedes that there are as many different ways to it as there are people. However, the founder of the psychoanalytic movement himself, Sigmund Freud, was not familiar with the aesthetic discussion of the terrible, ugly and grotesque as it took place in the art world.

In his 1919 essay about the “Uncanny”, Freud first explores the etymological foundation of the originally German term for “uncanny“, the unheimlich. The meaning of unheimlich is apparently the opposite of heimlich, meaning familiar, or, directly translated, homely1. The phoneme Heim is another word for home, house, an intimate, familiar place to hide away from the outside and to feel safe. This implies the character of the secret, too. A situation or object is unheimlich (meaning not familiar) when it is not known, strange or weird and causes a feeling of insecurity by its appearance with the particular person that does thus not feel safe anymore. In contrast to fear, the “Uncanny” takes a subtle way to create horror by making a person feel extremely uncomfortable with a situation, impression, objects or event.2 It can be caused either by an actual experience or by imagination.

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1 Freud, Sigmund, Studienausgabe Bd.IV (Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt, 1982) pp.244

2 ibid. p.250