An 'Uncanny' feeling

The word 'Uncanny' like all other words have been used in various connotations depending upon the varying range of situations. "I have an uncanny feeling that somebody is watching me". "You have an uncanny similarity to my dead sister". "It's so uncanny how you know what I am watching". Or it may be that the same number, for instance 26 appears to you a number of times in a day. Your hotel room no, your car parking, your seat no in a movie theater all appear to be 26! Regardless of your belief in superstition, you will feel strangely curious to decode the secret behind these series of events. You would want to know whether this was a random chance or has a causal basis. It must have happened to almost all of us that we think about someone after a long time and suddenly we receive news from them. This is a pleasant experience and we might not go into an in-depth investigation, we might simply consider it a beautiful chance and move ahead but what about the ones which cause disturbance or unpleasantness? A wife telling her husband during a heated argument that "I wish I don't have to see your face again" and half an hour later she gets a call that her husband met with a fatal accident. Abraham Lincoln had a precognitive dream about his untimely death. Calpurnia dreamt of her husband Julius Ceasar's assassination and she even warned him in vain. She dreamt that a statue of Caesar was flowing with blood as many Romans wash their hands in the blood. Don't you find these instances "uncanny"? 

In the film Insidious, the protagonist struggled to get his kid out of the possession of the spirits which haunted him as well in his childhood. His wife, and many other supported him in his endeavor while he traveled to the land of the dead to release his child's soul from the demonic shackles of the ghosts. Towards the end, he returned back victoriously although the chances of his return were minimal. His wife, excited to see her husband, greeted him and as she went inside to get him something, he turned into a ghost! The End! Jentsch explains that this has been a powerful tool for directors, story writers etc to create an uncanny effect by leaving the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton; and to do it in such a way that the audience's attention is not directly focused upon his uncertainty, so that he may not be urged to go into the matter and clear it up immediately, since that would quickly dissipate the peculiar emotion of the thing. 

Ernst Jentsch in a 1906 essay, "On the Psychology of the Uncanny" defines the 'Uncanny' as: being a product of "intellectual uncertainty; so that the uncanny would always, as it were, be something one does not know one’s way about in. The better orientated in his environment a person is, the less readily will he get the impression of something uncanny in regard to the objects and events in it". The concept of the Uncanny was later elaborated on and developed by Sigmund Freud which also draws on the work of Hoffmann (whom Freud refers to as the "unrivaled master of the uncanny in literature"). He criticized Jentsch's belief that Olympia was the most uncanny element of the story. Instead, Freud draws on a wholly different element of the story, namely, "the idea of being robbed of one's eyes," as the "more striking instance of un-canniness" in the tale. 

Sigmund Freud (1919) states in his article that 'Uncanny' is a terrifying feeling that comes from something previously known or familiar that has been repressed and suddenly comes to light. He calls the uncanny as "that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar". One may think that how is uncanny different from all that which are constituted within the boundaries of fearful. It differs from sources of fear that have a realistic basis such as physical danger. Freud attributes the uncanny to two major sources: animistic beliefs and infantile complexes. Animistic beliefs include belief in the return of the dead, in magic, and in what Freud calls the "omnipotence of thoughts," the power of mind over matter. Such beliefs dominated the infancy of humanity and now dominate the infancy of the individual, but are surmounted during maturation.

To put it in most simple words 'uncanny' is something that is odd, mysterious, unexpected and is strange yet familiar which makes you feel uneasy or uncomfortable. It often creates a cognitive dissonance within the experiencing subject due to the paradoxical nature of being attracted to, yet repulsed by an object at the same time. This cognitive dissonance often leads to an outright rejection of the object, as one would rather reject than rationalize. The word is usually not clearly understood however, a lot of times it is associated with all that is creepy and, elicits horror and dread. The terrifying experience of dread or horror occurs either when repressed infantile complexes have been revived by some impression, or when the primitive beliefs we have surmounted seem once more to be confirmed. Ghosts, doubles, demons, living dead, etc., are certainly included within those primitive beliefs. We think we have surmounted long time ago, and which are mainly seen nowadays as ways of entertainment.

Many people experience the feeling in the highest degree in relation to death and dead bodies, to the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts. An ancient belief that dead can become visible in the form of spirits and that the deceased becomes the enemy of the survivor and wants to carry him off to share his new life with him. There is scarcely any other matter, however, upon which our thoughts and feelings have changed so little since the very earliest times, and in which discarded forms have been so completely preserved under a thin disguise, as our relation to death. Two things account for our conservatism, the strength of our original emotional reaction to death and the insufficiency of our scientific knowledge about it. Biology has not yet been able to decide whether death is an inevitable fate of every living being or whether it is only a regular yet perhaps avoidable event in life. The proposition "All men are mortal" are used to explain logic to students but have we really understood its meaning? A lot of religions promote life after death as an undeniable fact associated with death, governments use it to establish moral order in the name of a better life after death as a compensation of good earthly existence. There have been a lot of cases reported where the subjects have Near Death Experience (NDE) and Out of Body Experience (OBE) which are studied under the branch of paranormal psychology. 

 Otto Rank gave the concept of the "double" where he has linked it with reflections in the mirrors, with shadows, guardian spirits, with the belief in the soul and the fear of the death. The 'double' was originally an insurance against destruction of the ego, an "energetic denial of the power of the death" and probably the "immortal" soul was the first "double" of the body. The ancient Egyptians made images of the dead in some lasting material to defeat death forever. Such ideas, have sprung from the soil of unbounded self love, from the primary narcissism which holds sway in the mind of the child as in that of primitive man; and when this stage has been left behind the double takes on a different aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, he becomes the ghastly harbinger of death.   

Freud discussed many other factors like animism, magic, witchcraft, the omnipotence of thoughts, man's attitude towards death, involuntary repetition and the castration-complex. which turn something fearful into an uncanny thing. To label a situation as fearful or uncanny depends upon the person who has experienced it. His own subjectivity, fears, thoughts, beliefs, attitudes etc will all influence whether the situation is fearful or uncanny (for him). A situation which is uncanny for you might not be so for me. I don't deny the existence of paranormal phenomena but my stand is that to attribute all those things which we can't comprehend as something uncanny is also not right. One must first try to examine the situation for all the intrinsic causes like one's fears or complexes (either by himself or with the help of a psychologist) which could have caused it and then declare the situation as uncanny or not. So the next time you feel uncanny, watch out for your own fears and complexes first before attributing it to something supernatural!