reud's essay on the uncanny appeared in the journal Imago in 1919. It begins from an earlier paper by the psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch (1906) and argues with it. Jentsch's example, which Freud repeats in order to dispute, is the one that matters for machine-made things: the feeling produced by a figure that might or might not be alive. (Freud, 1919)

the document

“E. Jentsch hat als ausgezeichneten Fall den »Zweifel an der Beseelung eines anscheinend lebendigen Wesens und umgekehrt darüber, ob ein lebloser Gegenstand nicht etwa beseelt sei« hervorgehoben und sich dabei auf den Eindruck von Wachsfiguren, kunstvollen Puppen und Automaten berufen.”
— Sigmund Freud, Das Unheimliche, 1919 (Project Gutenberg 34222)

E. Jentsch singled out as an outstanding case the "doubt whether an apparently living being is really animate and, conversely, whether a lifeless object might not in fact be animate", and in doing so pointed to the impression made by waxworks, ingenious dolls and automata. [our translation, not a published one]

what it says

Jentsch located the uncanny in intellectual uncertainty: not knowing what kind of thing is in front of you (Jentsch, 1906). Freud thought this too thin. Reading E. T. A. Hoffmann's story "The Sandman", whose hero falls in love with the mechanical doll Olympia, he argued that the doll is not the source of the story's dread; the uncanny is the return of something once familiar and then repressed. For machine-made pictures the two accounts predict different things. Jentsch's says the unease should fade once you know what made the picture. Freud's says knowing may not help.

what is contested

In 1970 the roboticist Masahiro Mori proposed what he called the uncanny valley: as a robot looks more human, people like it more, until close to human likeness affinity drops sharply, and recovers only at full likeness Mori (1970; English translation 2012). Mori offered it as a design caution, not a measured curve. Later experiments have found dips for some stimuli and not others, and disagree about whether the cause is categorical uncertainty (Jentsch's answer), mismatched cues, or something else. [the house's view] We treat it as a useful name for a real experience whose shape is not settled.

methodological critiques

Freud's evidence is literary and introspective; Jentsch's is a short essay with examples. Neither tested anything. Mori drew a graph without data. The modern literature tests these ideas with rated faces and morph sequences, which is a long way from the waxworks, and from a picture that might have been made by a person.

later reception

The essay is now read across literature, film and robotics. For images, what was once unease about a doll is now often unease about a picture: hands with the wrong number of fingers, text that is almost letters. Those artefacts fade as models improve, which is a small test of Jentsch against Freud running in public. See anthropomorphism for the opposite mistake, seeing a mind where there is none.

in the tour: a wing planned for the tour, called "Who made this?", will have a room called “The Valley” ···

References

1. Freud (1919). Das Unheimliche. First published in Imago 5 (1919). Project Gutenberg ebook 34222. www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/34222
2. Jentsch (1906). Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen. Psychiatrisch-Neurologische Wochenschrift 8 (1906). Cited here only as Freud quotes him.
3. Mori, MacDorman & Kageki (2012). The uncanny valley. IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine. doi:10.1109/MRA.2012.2192811

see also