Search Details

Word: uncanny (lookup usage) (lookup stats)


Meaning:

Adjective:

  • strange, and mysteriously unsettling (as if supernatural); weird
  • The Uncanny is a Freudian concept of an instance where something can be familiar, yet foreign at the same time, often being uncomfortably strange [http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~amtower/uncanny.html]. Freud describes the uncanny in his work as analogous to the German ''Unheimliche'' or unhomely. The uncanny is "something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed. The link with repression now illuminates Schelling's definition of the uncanny's 'something that should have remained hidden and has come into open'" [http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0142437476&id=zqafz8HKpC4C&pg=PP1&lpg=PP1&ots=3pn2paWVXr&dq=freud+uncanny&sig=uGxiPlQX-o48t2nGY-NyxdDgJMU#PPA148,M1].

Source: Wiktionary | Src Info »