Unheimlich

[The Sandman is] a wicked man who comes when children
won't go to bed, and throws handfuls of sand in their eyes so
that they jump out of their heads all bleeding.'
E.T.A. Hoffman 1816 The Sandman

We know from psycho-analytic experience, however, that the
fear of damaging or losing one's eyes is a terrible one in
children. Many adults retain their apprehensiveness in this
respect, and no physical injury is so much dreaded by them as
an injury to the eye. […] A study of dreams, phantasies and
myths has taught as that anxiety about one's eyes, the fear of
going blind, is often enough a substitute for the dread of being castrated.
Sigmund Freud 1919 The Uncanny

Diving Board Sketch

Unheimlich opens 17th of April (Leeds Met Gallery)

Wittgenstein : A Family Resemblance

In his book Philosophical Investigations (1951), Ludwig Wittgenstein proposed a theory of "family resemblances" to understand the nature of terms that do not admit of a full and complete definition. This idea is summarised by John Heaton in his book Introducing Wittgenstein (1999):

"We take the words out of their natural place in talking and assume they refer to some essence or ideal entity which we try to define. Because the word is uniform in appearance, we assume it refers to a uniform entity about which we can generalise. We forget the application of the word.

Take the word "good". What is common between a good joke, a good tennis player, a good man, feeling good, good will, good breeding, good looking, and a good for nothing? There is no one common property which the word good refers to.

We cannot analyze the word so that we reach some essence or element from which the concept is built up. But there are resemblances between the various meanings of the term – like family resemblances."
John Heaton (paraphrasing Ludwig Wittgenstein) Introducing Wittgenstein pp.126-127

In his essay on The 'Uncanny' (1919), Freud attempts to distill a definition (or 'essence') of the term "uncanny" by analysing examples of its application. His acknowledgement of the difficulties of this approach are an example of the problem that Wittgenstein's theory of family resemblances describes:

"… the word [uncanny] is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with what excites fear in general. Yet we may expect that a special core of feeling is present which justifies the use of a special conceptual term. One is curious to know what this common core is which allows us to distinguish as 'uncanny' certain things which lie within the field of what is frightening.
…
In his study of the 'uncanny' Jentsch quite rightly lays stress on the obstacle presented by the fact that people vary so very greatly in their sensitivity to this quality of feeling.
…
Sigmund Freud The 'Uncanny' in An Infantile
Neurosis and Other Works pp.219-220

Mike Kelley also describes collecting a group of examples of the uncanny in order to better define the meaning of the word, in the opening of his essay Playing with Dead Things: On the Uncanny (1993):

"What I'm after is a group of objects that, like the original collection of images I pinned to my wall, share an 'uncanny' quality. What this quality is, precisely, and how it functions, are difficult to describe."
Mike Kelley p.26 The Uncanny

Their feeling that the word uncanny is ill-defined and provisional is indicated by the fact that both Freud and Kelley frequently place it between inverted commas.

In his essay, The Uncanny, Freud discusses the uncanny qualities of "the double". In a footnote he writes:

… it is interesting to observe what the effect is of meeting one's own image unbidden and unexpected. Ernst Mach has related two such observations in his Analyse der Empfindungen (1900). On the first occasion he was not a little startled when he realised that the face before him was his own. The second time he formed a very unfavourable opinion about the supposed stranger who entered the omnibus, and thought 'What a shabby-looking school-master that man is who is getting in!' – I can report a similar adventure. I was sitting alone in my wagon-lit compartment when a more than usually violent jolt of the train swung back the door of the adjoining washing cabinet, and an elderly gentleman in a dressing-gown and a travelling cap came in. I assumed that in leaving the washing-cabinet, which lay between the two compartments, he had taken the wrong direction and come into my compartment by mistake. Jumping up with the intention of putting him right, I at once realised to my dismay that the intruder was nothing but my own reflection in the looking-glass on the open door. I can still recollect that I thoroughly disliked his appearance. Instead,
therefore, of being frightened by our 'doubles', both Mach and I simply failed to recognise them as such. Is it not possible, though, that our dislike of them was a vestigial trace of the archaic reaction which feels the 'double' to be something uncanny.
p.248

In his essay, The Uncanny, Freud discusses the uncanny qualities of "the double". On the first occasion he was not a little startled when he realised that the face before him was his own. The second time he formed a very unfavourable opinion about the supposed stranger who entered the omnibus, and thought 'What a shabby-looking school-master that man is who is getting in!' – I can report a similar adventure. I was sitting alone in my wagon-lit compartment when a more than usually violent jolt of the train swung back the door of the adjoining washing cabinet, and an elderly gentleman in a dressing-gown and a travelling cap came in. I assumed that in leaving the washing-cabinet, which lay between the two compartments, he had taken the wrong direction and come into my compartment by mistake. Jumping up with the intention of putting him right, I at once realised to my dismay that the intruder was nothing but my own reflection in the looking-glass on the open door. I can still recollect that I thoroughly disliked his appearance. Instead,
therefore, of being frightened by our 'doubles', both Mach and I simply failed to recognise them as such. Is it not possible, though, that our dislike of them was a vestigial trace of the archaic reaction which feels the 'double' to be something uncanny.
p.248