ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the book and Freud’s uncanny. It diagnoses the symptoms, and engage in a talking cure, of the psychogeopathology of the will to fill or drain wetlands, the uncanny place par excellence. Psychogeopathology is the mental illness associated with what Aldo Leopold, a pioneer of conservation, called ‘land pathology.’ Wetlands are sometimes not, and sometimes not ever, the most pleasant of places. In Western aesthetics they are not beautiful, sublime or picturesque. President Trump’s obsession with draining the swamp of Washington is used to illustrate and elaborate the analytical and critical power of the uncanny.
