ABSTRACT
"The uncanny valley" is a term coined by the Japanese roboticist, Masahiro Mori in an essay published in 1970. Mori explores some of the phenomena Freud describes in his famous work on the uncanny: moving dolls, disembodied hands and the sense of dread evoked by anything quasi-human. To move on to a modern and popular incarnation of the uncanny, Masahiro Mori's essay discusses what people do and don't like about robots. Psychoanalysts could be said to position themselves at both extremes of the uncanny valley. To compress the essay into something really short and stupid, Freud goes on to show how all sorts of things that might have appealed to us at one point become uncanny due to repression. For Freud, however, the fact that children like it and think it could actually happen isn't an argument against the same idea causing uncanny effects—especially in later life.
