Sigmund Freud: An Understanding of the Word Uncanny - Essay Example

Sigmund Freud: An Understanding of the Word “Uncanny” Uncanny comes from a Gaelic word “Ken” which means “To Know”. Therefore, it is un-ken-ny; Of the Unknowable. Uncanniness is an experience of goose bumps on skin when one feels something strange or unusual that arouses superstitious fear. Children aged ten and up usually experienced it by reading scary stories, watching movies of benevolent monsters or in scary situations like on holding a monster mask as it excites fear. No doubt, it is something that is very frightening and arouses terror and dread. Brain triggered goose bumps like other emotion-linked reflexes such as blushing and turning pale. This also drives sex, fear, rage, aggression and hunger. In humans, the brain allows emotional stimulation from music or the watching of a scary movie. “Uncanny,” p.195: Freud definition of uncanny is “uncanny as the class of frightening things that leads us back to what is known and familiar.” His aim is to demonstrate it psychoanalytically that it is based on intellectual uncertainty. We experience uncanny when we are least prepared for an unusual situation in life. It is something that happen all of a sudden beyond our expectations. It is a situation where something can be familiar yet foreign at the same time and results in a feeling that is strange and uncomfortable. It often creates cognitive dissonance, a condition of conflict within an individual due to inconsistency between beliefs and actions. This attraction and repulsion at the same time leads to an outright rejection of the object, as an individual would rather reject than rationalize. It is a kind of disturbing strangeness evoked on reading a horror story or related fiction. Uncanny is an effect of watching fiction movies showing incredible events. It can be an effect of a dream, hallucination or delusion. When the child grows up, these fears hide deep within his subconscious. This unusual fright is totally without logical reason. In an adult, the feelings of childhood remain throughout adult life. He can only rationally explain his fear. The feelings of fright are only faintly perceptible and this can be a cause of uncanniness. People may vary greatly in their sensitivity to this quality of feelings. Moreover, the response varies from person to person. “For some, being in a specific fearful situation causes goose bumps, but in another the same specific situation does not,” explains the University of Kansas’ Dr. David Pendergras, who has written about goose bumps and related responses. In order to understand the word “uncanny” we need to collect all those properties of an individual, things, senses, situations and experiences and then infer the unknown nature of the uncanny from what all these properties have in common. Careful observation of both lead to the same result that the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to old memories and long familiar experiences. According to Sigmud Freud 'The uncanny is the class of frightening things that leads us back to what is known and familiar.’ Freud makes distinctions between two different experiences that are main causes of uncanny, the one generated by events in daily life and other are experience of art generated while reading texts or literature. In Freud’s theory he states that the “Study of dreams, fantasies and myths has taught us that a morbid anxiety connected with the eyes and with going blind is often enough a substitute for the dread of castration”. The experiences of uncanny in daily life are seems to be related to such circumstances that cause sense of fear in the unconscious. The uncanny in reading literature seems to be a part of fictional world. In second case, there are more means of creating uncanny effects in fictional world than that in real life. The effect of uncanny in an everyday reality is all of a sudden. The uncanny is the subject of aesthetics because it deals with a certain kind of feelings and emotions. The definition of uncanny merged here in aesthetic and psychoanalysis. It is rare that a psychologist drive forward to inquire into detail the subject of aesthetics, even when it understood that it is not merely the theory of beauty but the theory of quality of feelings. Psychoanalyst also works on other strata of mental life usually collecting the data for the study of aesthetics. He does not interest himself in some particular province of that subject, the one that has been neglected in the literature of aesthetics or rather the remote one. Aesthetics is not only a theory of beauty but also the theory of quality of feelings. In general, aesthetics prefer to deals with beauty, positive emotions, taste and attraction, whether in the form of the comic, the tragic or the sublime, while the uncanny is something fearful and frightening rather uncanny is opposite feelings of repulsion and distress. As such, the history of aesthetics neglects it. However, modern thought and practice marks a change in aesthetics in general by fascinating it with the ugly. We call it grotesque, which means a kind of negative aesthetics. Freud made a great contribution to the aesthetics literature of the “beautiful” by examining anxiety what we might call the aesthetics of “fearful”. Freud studied both psychoanalytic and aesthetic modes of thought to develop his remarkable theory of the uncanny. This theory remained incomplete if he failed to regard both of these. It is important to know and understand that Freud interprets beauty as an inhibited aim. It is a changing reflection of our amatory inborn pattern of behavior and impulses. Freud plays a part of a critic in literature. He tries to explain the influence of an inevitable kind of literature; he is concerned with literary acceptance. Related to this literary awareness, he starts his analysis with the meaning of the word “uncanny (unheimlich). Heimlich is a German word that means belonging to the house; friendly; intimate; comfortable. The second definition of Heimlich is concealed; secret; private. The word Heimlich incorporates the dialectic of privacy and intimacy. Therefore, it is related to the private parts that are the most intimate. However, in Freud’s thoughts the Heimlich is something concealed from the self. Uncanny is unheimlich that means unhomey; unfamiliar; uncomfortable; unsecret. So unheimlich is something that has been exposed. It was supposed to be remained secret and hidden but has mistakenly self exposed. So the uncanny is the revelation of something what is private; concealed and hidden not only from others but also from the self. In Freudian terminology: “the uncanny is the mark of the return of the repressed.” (“Uncanny” 217) Contemporary art is art from the 1960’s or 70’s until this very minute. It has been and continues to be created during our lifetimes. In other words, it is contemporary to us. It is postmodern art because it is round 1970. This art enjoys far more working artists making far more art. The period of post modernism is from 1970s to mid 1980s. There was an Ugly Realism; Feminist art; Yunnan School art movements until late 1970s. There was New Image Painting in late 70s and Bad Painting in early 80s. There are museums of contemporary art showing their collections of art produced since world war II. Freud defines the uncanny in his 1919 paper, and relates the uncanny to contemporary thought and postmodern theory and art. “The uncanny is created or emerges in that fissure formed by a tension that results from a collapse of fixed certainties and accepted familiarity. Central element in the idea of the uncanny, which has been adopted by the post-dislocation, de-centeredness, the un-homely and nothingness in place of habitual identity, Furthermore, the meaning of the uncanny has the potential to disturb the logo centric views of modernism.” Freud associated uncanny with the dead or the kingdom of the dead like ghosts, symbolic dreams and hallucinations. He equates with metaphors that are poetically portrayed by uncanny grasp of the meaning of life characterized by unhealthy fascination with death, decay and the uncanny. Masaki Yada is a well-known artist; the central theme in his contemporary art was to investigate his inner self. His work shows his searching for his child like self who has untamed and uncivilized desires. His work touched the psychology subjects, such as dream, memory, eroticism, etc. He realized that all subjects that he dealt with in the study of psychology are in many ways relevant to a word “Uncanny”. He believes that uncanny is a peculiar combination of the familiar and unfamiliar, as the form of something familiar unexpectedly arising in a strange and unfamiliar context, or of something strange and unfamiliar unexpectedly arising in a familiar context. At some level, the feeling of uncanny is related to the extreme nostalgia. As well as the uncanny is never far from humour, irony and laughter. The uncanny remain Masaki Yada’s source of inspiration for his every new work. His challenge is to create aesthetically beautiful and seductive artwork. His contemporary art not only includes fine arts but also literature, music and frightening beauty. Colin David is a master of contemporary art and an outstanding painter. He created brilliant paintings with technical perfection that are very rare. Ken Done is an Australian artist. He is famous for his brightly coloured landmarks of Australia. He is well known for his best work in clothing n home wares designing. Hal Foster is an amazing artist. His life is an adventure and his attitude about life drives him to become a philosophical foundation for his fabulous creation. He is Associate Professor of Art History and comparative Literature at Cornell University. In addition, he is an editor of the journal October and author of the Return of the Real. His uncanny images are very famous. He created the definitive Tarzan. He established a look of nobility and aristocracy that would influence every artist who created the Ape-Man. Foster’s work appeared in comics. His technique is known as a story-strip, which allows him to create compositions with detailed backgrounds. Foster did the adaptation himself and he had no instructions at all. When he finished his adaptation of Tarzan of the Apes, he has drawn 300 panels. He was the first one to bring painterly impressions to comics. He not only paved the way for cartoonists but he also created a captivating mythology. In Compulsive Beauty, Foster reads surrealism as an art given over to the uncanny. He first restages the difficult encounter of surrealism with psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud. He then redefines categories of surrealism in terms of Sigmund Freud’s uncanny. He created number of surrealist robots and mannequins. These were the reflections on the uncanny processes of mechanization. He considers the surrealist use of unfashionable images as an attempt to work through historical repression. Compulsive Beauty is a reconstructive reading of surrealism, which, is neglected by Anglo-American art history. It is a best example of reconsideration of postmodernism. In Prosthetic Gods, he imagine a new self, equal to the new art of modernism; primordial and futuristic fictions of origin in the work of Picasso. Foster’s uncanny images are focusing critical attention on the contemporary arts and their various contexts of interpretation like sculpture, painting, music, performance and literature. James Casebere was born in 1953,in Lansing, Michigan. He studied in Michigan State University, and graduated from Minneapois College of Art and Design in 1976. His outstanding work on photography established him at the forefront of artist. His pioneering work was associated with the “Picture Generation” of “post-modern” artist who emerged in the 1980’s. Casebere is interested in a work at which three of his interest meet. He focused on the point at which photography, architecture and sculpture intersect. He was one of the first postmodern artists who created images using camera. For the last thirty years, he has consistently plan in mind some increasingly complicated models and photographed them in his studio. His work is a solid understanding of architecture and is hauntingly evocative. He created interior spaces out of coloured paper. Using very simple materials like plaster, Styrofoam and cardboard, he made many table-sized constructions by paring them down into indispensable forms. He has been making photographs of table-top constructions of the built environment. For that, he also created room-sized installations of his model to create a place to be experienced rather than photographed. His table-top models mimic the appearance of archetypal institutions and tropes, like tunnel, corridor, home, school, library and prison. Until late 1970’s, his work focused at interiors and domestic spaces. In 1980’s, he started creating images of public spaces like libraries, streets, courtrooms and homes. He wanted to capture extraordinary from everyday life. Casebere also made large-scale sculpture installations, starting with Sonsbeek ’86, in Arnhem, Holland and ending around 1991. His early work focused on photographs of residential areas. The subject of his work on images ranges from home interiors to institutional mega structures. With the work on images of the suburban home, he also works with both photographs and sculpture installations. His every image is a photograph of a model of a building and he has stripped of its minute details and colour to create a new sense of emotion with his imagination. His resulting photographs are beautiful. They are very attractive and have ghost like quality in them. His fabulous sculpture deals with the myth of the American West. His work on American architecture became the prototype for many other buildings. In early 1990’s, he also focused his attention to the development of many institutions for art and culture. He was so desperate about his work that to take photographs of prison, he approaches to jail. A number of his photographs invite viewers to imagine prison-like spaces, which he modeled after actual prison. Casebere is interested in institutions of our lives. He explored this theme of relationship in his images of prison, storefronts and other domestic and public spaces. These works express the solitude and loneliness of immense empty spaces while at the same time, these works refer to particular locations like Sing Sing or prison at Cherry Hill. This subject creates a new imagination to the idea of social control and his images help in reference to writings about what is visible to everyone. While working on prison images, he focuses on circulation of air, water and people. The prison images shows deprivation and sense of poverty. His work on prisons is an institutional architecture. In his photographs, he has constructed models of Philips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. In these works, he dramatically depicted the lit hallway. He created images of hallways, corridors and eventually the flooded hallways and flooded tunnels. In his images, the hallway appears folded. The flooded images were showing some sense of fullness, a fear of drowning. It depicted a sense of overflow that can be good or bad but it was showing movement. He built the pink and blue hallway both with flooded spaces. He worked with pink and blue colour and with ornamental details. He created an illusion of water on the floor that present a beautiful play of light and shadow. He designed an open rectangular space with doors left open, anybody who came to visit can just walk through the house. Long empty hallways are never provoking, but his depicted work of institutional spaces invite memories and attract wonder. His works on long empty hallways do not present conclusion, only possibilities. In late 1990’s he made large photographs of folded image whose source span was the globe of earth. It was starting with the bunker and two tunnels. He created an expensive and the marvelous body of work on Atlantic slave trade. This includes 18th century American colonial architecture, a slave factory in West Africa and plantations in the West Indies. His work was both surreal, remarkably realistic and a very romantic idea in American history. The modern architects inspired him a lot. Among them, Victora Horta and Richard Neutra’s work was quite inspiring for him. They inspired him to create a small somber and ascetic group of works that seems to be the effect of globalization. After the terrible incident of 9/11, Casebere attention turned toward Spain and Eastern Mediterranean. His work examines the flowering of culture and co-operation between Islamic, Christian and Jewish culture. Several other images of his unique work present sculpture of Tripoli, Lebanon, Nineveh, Samara in Iraq, and Luxor, Egypt. He create many soaring models of mosques and their photographs were inspired by Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan of the 16th century. He had many exhibitions of his fabulous work. In 2002-3, Casebere had solo exhibition at Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston Salem, NC, which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, OH. In 2000-2001, he was in an exhibition initiated by Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy. He marvelous and unique work has been collected by many museums worldwide, including the Whitney Museum of American art, Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and many more. His work is organically unified and this because his images captivates our collective imagination. His work can easily be recognized by his moody lights and fabricated architecture. His each image is another series of an epic tale and they are very secular. His images in the Penn Station installation were a combination of two bodies of work, a synthesis of a domestic space with romantic. He also built a simple model of an outdoor train platform. In this model, he was trying to create a wistful daydreaming. For Casebere, an artist might make paintings, design buildings, do graphics, photographs and sculpture but he believed that an artist had a useful purpose of the society. He wanted to put his images in advertising way, the way conceptual artist do. He wanted to design images that relate to everyday experiences of life of people. Conceptual artists who became sculptors have a great influenced on him. He also shoots white models with colour films. These models become more sensuous and highly appreciative. James Casebere, in his creative work tried to create a physical relationship between the viewer and the work that would allow the viewer to enter into the space. His work is a stylistic origin of modernism. The viewer of his picture enters through its physical size, and the picture enters the viewer. Since the 1980’s, James Casebere’s photographs have captured viewers into ambiguous, evocative and dreamy environments. He dramatically lights his models and constructions so to invite viewers to project into it and inhabit the space. Since the late 1990’s, Casebere has lived in Fort Greene Brooklyn, with his wife Lorna Simpson and their daughter Zora. Work Cited Freud,Sigmund 'The Uncanny'(1926)in the Standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, James Strachey(ed.) London:Hogarth,1955:219-56(P) James Casebere The Spatial Uncanny Foster,Hal "Uncanny Images" Art in America November 1983: 202-204 http://www.german.leeds.ac.uk/RWI/2004_05project1/WWW/uon/uncanny/uncanny2.htm http://www.free-essays.us/dbase/c9/kfw242.shtml http://www.syncrat.com/articles/goosebumps-what-causes-goose-bumps http://www.academon.com/Essay-The-Uncanny-of-Freud-Urban-Life-and-Contemporary-Art/54711 http://jamescasebere.net/bio.html Read More