The Uncanny in Therapeutic Process
“It is only rarely that a psycho-analyst feels impelled to investigate the subject of aesthetics, even when aesthetics is understood to mean not merely the theory of beauty but the theory of the qualities of feeling. He works in other strata of mental life and has little to do with the subdued emotional impulses which, inhibited in their aims and dependent on a host of concurrent factors, usually furnish the material for the study of aesthetics. But it does occasionally happen that he has to interest himself in some particular province of that subject; and this province usually proves to be a rather remote one, and one which has been neglected in the specialist literature of aesthetics.”
These are the opening lines for Freud’s essay on the experience of the uncanny. He continues: “The subject of the ‘uncanny’ is a province of this kind. It is undoubtedly related to what is frightening—to what arouses dread and horror; equally certainly, too, the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with what excites fear in general.”
The Uncanny feels like a particularly unique essay in Freud’s catalogue, situated as it is within the category of essays where he ventures away from affecting the position of scientist and openly acknowledges he is doing something more like aesthetics…or philosophy. Of course, the idea that someone practicing analysis—or a form of psychotherapy that takes up the considerations of psychoanalysis—would be interested in something we would call aesthetics seems far less anomalous these days. Psychotherapy, as it is understood within that framework today, is primarily concerned with technique as an aesthetic consideration. The perceived nature of the relationship drives therapeutic intervention and those perceptions and our responses to them are ultimately of an aesthetic concern. Therapy, when practiced in this mode, is a creative act. One of exploring and executing on (and through those processes, we could also say making a statement about) an idea about what therapy should look like.
Which means, at least in part, therapy is about doing what feels right. Or, said more precisely, it is about selecting a response based on a feeling or set of feelings that are arising. One of these feelings is the peculiar one being described here by Freud. Those only cursorily familiar with the idea of the uncanny might think it strange to use this word to describe aspects of what goes on in the therapeutic process. To be sure, this isn’t entirely what Freud is doing in this essay. It is not “The Uncanny and it’s Appearances in Psychoanalysis”. But that is perhaps implicitly what the essay is aspiring to.
Freud is perceptive about the ways in which our sense of the uncanny emerges in response to certain phenomena and what kind of behaviors it seems to elicit. Rather than talk about transference, he talks about doubling, preverbal states of merger, omnipotence, and repetition in the absence of memory (or what we now plainly call the repetition compulsion). It would be absurd to assume that Freud was giving us this essay purely as a commentary on literary aesthetics. We should by contrast assume he is trying to offer us something about how and where this feeling arises in the therapeutic task and what it is like to be with it.
It is hard to talk about this phenomenon as Freud describes it without first giving a little context on the German work “unheimlich”, literally not-home and it’s opposite “heimlich”. Etymologically the word “heimlich” has moved away from its historically meaning of “home” or “cozy”, oddly enough the usage Freud is most interested in here, and is used now to relate to something that is secret or stored away from the rest of the world. Previously, as Freud notes, it was meant to mean something homey or familiar, with unheimlich meaning something like that which is strange or unfamiliar (getting us our translation to the word uncanny). However, both “heimlich” and “unheimlich” carried parallel meanings of this idea of being secret or stored away, leaving the words a bit ambiguous in a way that benefits a hermeneutic reading of the two terms. Thus, “unheimlich”, or the uncanny, is simultaneously that which is both personal/stored away and strange. It both resonates and repels, leaving us with a sensation Freud describes as being “frightened” but which might better be understood as a kind of existential anxiety, disruption, or dislocation.
In this way, something like transference, despite being unmentioned in this paper, bears some sense of the uncanny in the way it presents itself. Through its enactment in the therapeutic relationship, transference phenomena become the expression of the past in the present and the conduit that brings the present into the past. In recognizing ourselves as serving some necessary function based on the psychological structures that clients bring into the work, we are rendered both ourself and not ourself. Projective identification amplifies this experience, putting therapists in the unusual position of having to negotiate feelings that simultaneously are and are not our own. In the more emotionally intense expressions of this phenomena, it can feel like our affective system is getting hijacked to play out experiences it might otherwise be apt to take up some position of neutrality against.
The uncanny also finds itself coalescing in the way individuals experience what we typical refer to as the repetition compulsion. It’s been some time since I’ve discussed this phenomenon. For Freud the repetition compulsion is that which gets interpreted in the transference, though prior to arriving in therapy, it is broadly understood as that which the client repeats throughout all their relationships because they cannot remember the incidents (and more specifically the affect behind those incidents) driving the compulsion. Repression and other defenses lead to clients developing patterns which are so embedded in who they are that they play out before they reach the field of consciousness. The repetition compulsion is the thing which leads us to “always” date the same kind of people, struggle with authority across contexts and settings, constantly sacrifice our own needs in the services of other’s needs, or resist vulnerability and intimacy in most relationships (to name a few prominent and perhaps familiar examples). The way this happens is so automatic and so beneath the surface that you may in fact spend a considerable amount of time in therapy simply reflecting to the client how this is showing up.
It is in this way that we as therapists might actually be able to leverage the uncanny. Freud’s position seems to be that there is little we can do to facilitate the arrival of the uncanny. That it is something that will show up in the work, but seemingly must show up of its own accord. I think this is mostly true. The ground certainly needs to be set for the client to be able to see it, through consistent containment, thoughtful interpretation, and careful attending to the relational dynamics at play in the therapy. However, I do think that—starting with Winnicott’s notion of interpreting to evoke, up through to relational interpretations which state something about what is happening in the relationship—there are types of therapeutic interventions that can more effectively create the conditions for the uncanny to announce itself. If the uncanny is in its most basic sense the intermingling of the familiar and the strange, then sensitively defamiliarizing the patterns the client is playing out will by design invite new perceptions of the experience to emerge. To be sure, this will first bump up against the cleverness of the defenses to distort the perception of the relationship to suit their own needs, and so time is a critical factor in all of this. Also, depending on concerns related to developmental need, deficit, and safety, this may not even be where the work is meant to start.
One of the most interesting components of this, I think, is where it is centered in the therapist. The affective and relational channels flow both ways (or at least part of what we are trying to impart in the work we do is that they can flow both ways). One of the most pronounced experiences I get to regularly have with my clients are moments where the work we are doing takes a turn into the uncanny. Often, we will be going through a familiar script and set of recitations, when suddenly something shifts and a process feels so familiar as to be disruptive unto itself. It has seemed to me, that when I comment on this experience as it is finding its expression in me, it opens the client up to engaging in a kind of metacommentary which brings new layers of understanding to what is happening between us. Sometimes this connects to some other aspect of what is happening for the client, other times it does not. But, at the very least, I think it invites the client into considering ways they can come to reflect on familiar processes in new ways, which begins to disrupt the flow of familiar patterns and brings them into finer focus and attention. Understood existentially, this is the process of learning how to attune to the disclosiveness of being.
In the interest of keeping this post digestible, I will stop there for now, but this is a surprisingly long essay from Freud and I may come back to some of the later portions in another post. Nonetheless, this notion of the uncanny certainly seems both philosophically and psychologically rich and is one that can help to organize the therapeutic interaction in interesting ways. It’s not Freud’s only essay that deals with aesthetics, but it is certainly his most prominent, and leads one to wonder what the early days of analysis might have looked like had Freud been more interested in the art of his science rather than the science of his art.
