ABSTRACT
Uncanny phenomena can occur during a session, whose fruitfulness may be compared with undergoing episodes of depersonalisation. Freud thinks so, noting that "It often happens that neurotic men declare that they feel there is something uncanny about the female genital organs". At the very beginning of his study, he devotes many pages to a linguistic approach to the term "unheimlich", citing terms which define related emotions: fright, fear, anxiety, horror. "The 'Uncanny', then, is certainly not simply a work that has been left in a drawer and rescued from oblivion", as Freud claims in a letter to Ferenczi. Furthermore, the effort he devotes to studying the phenomenon—one some would consider as almost marginal compared with the other issues that psychoanalysis is faced with—shows that this is not at all the case. Consequently, the uncanny —which transcends in any case the specific domain of aesthetics—largely justifies a closer study.
