The writer of the present contribution, indeed, must himself plead guilty to a
special obtuseness in the matter, where extreme delicacy of perception would
be more in place. It is long since he has experienced or heard of anything
which has given him an uncanny impression, and he must start by translating
himself into that state of feeling, by awakening in himself the possibility of
experiencing it.^36
Why might Freud worry that he will misconstrue the uncanny because
he is unsusceptible to it, when he has never needed to undergo all the
neuroses of his patients? What is it about the uncanny that requires a
personal familiarity, where hysteria or melancholia do not?^37 This impli-
cation that the uncanny cannot be viewed from the outside, as it were,
provokes a further question: what confidence can we have in Freud’s
objective ascription of the feeling to the return of childhood anxieties:
are those anxieties doing their own diagnosing? As Neil Hertz has brilli-
antly pointed out, when Freud’s essay turns towards the compulsion to
repeat, it is itself subject to the uncanny. In his lengthy analysis of ‘The
Sandman’, Freud may be repeating himself, retelling Hoffmann’s story as
a version of his own rivalries, repeating Hoffmann’s uncanny veering
between the literal and figural in his own description of the compulsion.
What was supposed to be an objective representation of the repetition
compulsion turns out to have been motivated by the very compulsion it
claims to discover – and this ungroundable repetition is the movement of
the uncanny itself. However, Hertz concerns himself only with the section
on repetition, following Rieff ’s summary that Freud’s speculations about
other infantile complexes are a ‘relatively pale piece of erudition’, but in fact
Freud’s difficulty with grounding the uncanny is evident right from the
beginning of the essay, especially in the inordinately lengthy dictionary
definitions of the first part.^38
It begins when Freud talks about translating himself into a person
sensitive to the uncanny, because he then devotes two pages to showing
that the uncanny –unheimlich– is a word that can’t really be translated.
For Freud, only in German does the true sense of the word exist: ‘We will
first turn to other languages. But the dictionaries that we consult tell us
nothing new, perhaps only because we ourselves speak a language that is
foreign. Indeed, we get an impression that many languages are without a
word for this particular shade of what is frightening.’^39 This fruitless
search through other languages displays the characteristic pattern of the
uncanny itself, because in order to translate himself into this mysterious
experience, Freud must return to what he already knows, German: the
heimlich/unheimlichcouple is waiting for him in his mother tongue only.
Walter de la Mare’s ideal reader 123