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UNCANNY An experience of the unexpected in life or art which has the effect of rendering the familiar strange or the strange familiar. It also denotes a particular disconcerting effect of eerie fear which brings to mind something so long familiar that it has become taken for granted or forgotten. Sigmund Freud suggests that this can be read as a symptom of an early repression. The uncanny is a sign that something once familiar from a community or an individual’s childhood or ‘prehistory’ has now returned from a state of repression. It is manifested as a feeling of being at odds with oneself. Psychoanalysis reads the uncanny symptom in order to diagnose a patient’s neurosis. Similarly, by being attentive to uncanny effects in conventional narratives – for example the intrusion of odd coincidences, repetition, déjà-vu and automatism – literary and cultural critics can examine how texts are constructed to give an effect of realism or truth. The uncanny thus unsettles conventional forms and de nitions. [JP]

See also Chapter 7.