Uncanny Spaces

By Trace Cabot

Sigmund Freud famously elaborated on the concept of the uncanny (German: Das Unheimliche, lit. “the opposite of […] belonging to the home”[1]) in his 1919 essay The Uncanny. The uncomfortable convergence of the familiar and the disturbingly alien, the spatial implications of the uncanny were investigated both in this seminal essay and by later scholars, both implicitly and explicitly, in a variety of different contexts, including architecture, colonialism, and cinema.

Uncanny Spaces in Sigmund Freud’s “The Uncanny” (1919)
Freud opens the essay with an account of the multiple definitions, both within German and a number of foreign languages, of the uncanny. He underscores the contradictions contained within the term Heimlich, crucially noting that it can refer to both that which is: “[c]oncealed, kept from sight, so that others do not get to know about it, withheld from others…” [2] as well as that which is: “Friendly, intimate, homelike; the enjoyment of quiet content, etc., arousing a sense of peaceful pleasure and security as in one within the four walls of his house.” [3] The ambivalence that he takes note of in relation to these contradictory definitions already contains a spatial dimension, with the domestic space (viewed habitually, premised on its security/integrity/stability as a place [the home vs. the house]; contains the possibility of intimacy/familiarity, etc.) already containing an alien dimension (that which defies habitual viewing [or must remain unviewed]; is premised on its unclear/permeability boundaries and contingency; contains the possibility of betrayal/deceit, is contingent, etc.).[4] [5]

He explicitly takes up the spatial dimensions of the uncanny in relation to the sensation of déjà vu. Sharing a personal anecdote alongside accounts from literature:

“Once, as I was walking through the deserted streets of a provincial town in Italy which was strange to me, on a hot summer afternoon, I found myself in a quarter the character of which could not long remain in doubt. Nothing but painted women were to be seen at the windows of the small houses, and I hastened to leave the narrow street at the next turning. But after having wandered about for a while without being directed, I suddenly found myself back in the same street, where my presence was now beginning to excite attention. I hurried away once more, but only to arrive yet a third time by devious paths in the same place. Now, however, a feeling overcame me which I can only describe as uncanny, and I was glad enough to abandon my exploratory walk and get straight back to the piazza I had left a short while before. Other situations having in common with my adventure an involuntary return to the same situation, but which differ radically from it in other respects, also result in the same feeling of helplessness and of something uncanny. As, for instance, when one is lost in a forest in high altitudes, caught, we will suppose, by the mountain mist, and when every endeavor to find the marked or familiar path ends again and again in a return to one and the same spot, recognizable by some particular landmark. Or when one wanders about in a dark, strange room, looking for the door or the electric switch, and collides for the hundredth time with the same piece of furniture...” [6]

In his proceeding analysis, he isolates involuntary repetition as the source of the sense of uncanniness within the ‘repeated’ space, linking this to the phenomenon of repetition-compulsion, wherein a trauma is repeatedly reenacted in contradiction to the pleasure principle, but instead is linked to a force: “more primitive, more elementary, more instinctive than the pleasure-principle […] [it] displace[s],” the death drive.[7] [8]

Uncanny Spaces in Anthony Vidler’s The Architectural Uncanny (1992)
Anthony Vidler takes up the notion of the uncanny as a key component of the experience of modernity, using the formative role of the notion within architecture to account for modernity both spatially and historically. Like Freud, his analysis begins with the role of the home, specifically as its exists as a bourgeois imaginary, to construct the foundation for this project. Using the detective novel to ground his opening observations, he writes: “a secure and homely interior and the fearful invasion of an alien presence; on a psychological level, its play was one of doubling, where the other is, strangely enough, experienced as a replica of the self, all the more fearsome because apparently the same.”[9] He foregrounds the experience of alienation within the modern city, central to his conceptualization of the spatially uncanny, as being more than a sense of: “not belonging; it was the fundamental propensity of the familiar to turn on its owners, suddenly to become defamiliarized, derealized[.]” [10]

This sense of the uncanny as that which transforms familiar spaces into alien landscapes occurs not only on the localizable level of the home (or the city), but on a continental level as well. Linking the emergence of the uncanny and the death drive in Freud’s writings to: “the extension of psychoanalysis to social concerns…”[11], Vidler claims the uncanny served as the driving force behind this movement. He specifically notes the way in which:

“[t]hemes of anxiety and dread, provoked by a real or imagined sense of homeliness,” seemed particularly appropriate to a moment when, as Freud noted in 1915, the entire “homeland” of Europe, cradle and apparently secure house of western civilization, was in the process of barbaric regression; when the territorial security that had fostered the notion of a unified culture was broken, bringing a powerful disillusionment with the universal “museum” of the European “fatherland.” The site of the uncanny was now no longer confined to the house or the city, but more properly extended to the no man’s land between the trenches, or the fields of ruins left after bombardment.” [12] [13]

While his account of modernity in relation to the spatialized uncanny is interesting, Vidler is at his most fascinating in his accounts of modernist architecture in detail. His early accounts of the uncanny and its relationship to nostalgia, the long shadow of which appears over the rest of the book, remained mired in an overly Heidegerrian register (with all of its fascistic resonances) that we might contrast with his more engaging treatments of uncanny spaces as containing revolutionary possibility that he detects elsewhere in his writings.[14] This framework places strange weight on the apparent inability of high modernist architecture to provide a satisfactory alternative to the alienation of the modern condition; the reconfiguration/manipulation of space according to politico-social ideals and novel aesthetic sensibilities continued to result in the persistence of uncanniness within the urban/domestic space. In spite of the aspirations of modernist architects to offer an alternative spatial configuration to alienated modernity: “the house [is still] no longer a home, […] a burden that has since emerged as the principal leitmotif of postmodernism.”[15]

== The Colonial Uncanny/Imperial Gothic == See: H. Wittenberg, “Occult, Empire and Landscape: The Colonial Uncanny in John Buchan’s African Writings”, Sections 42-43