Have you ever walked into a room in your own home and, for a few seconds, felt like you weren’t there?
Have you ever passed someone on the street who looked so much like someone you know that you felt a strange sense of unease?
Have you ever, years later, come across a scent, a song, or an object that suddenly transported you back to the past...
Or have you ever experienced something that’s hard to explain? As if a part of your past had, for a brief moment, come to stand right beside you. As if, all of a sudden, what no longer existed were to exist again. As if what was familiar had become unfamiliar.
Well, this sensation has a name: the uncanny. It’s nothing serious, and yet, something unsettles you…
This concept was developed by Sigmund Freud (1919) in his work *Unheimliche*, and he defines it as: “a moment when something familiar suddenly becomes a little strange.”
Imagine that…
Your own home no longer feels quite the same.
You come home late at night.
You know the rooms by heart. You know where the light switches are, you recognize every piece of furniture, every sound… and every nook and cranny.
But that night, something is different. The light seems unusual. The silence seems more profound than usual. You walk down the hallway, and for a few seconds, your own home seems strange to you.
And yet, nothing has changed. It’s the same. But… the way you experience it has just changed.
It is this paradox that interests Freud. The uncanny refers to the fact that something we know very well suddenly becomes difficult to recognize as familiar.
Freud (1919) describes an experience in which “the uncanny” paradoxically maintains a connection with what is already known to us. It’s a bit like the return of something that had been kept at a distance. That, in fact, is what makes the experience so unique.
Imagine that…
You’re out shopping. Suddenly, the scent of laundry detergent wafts toward you. And without really understanding why, you think of your grandmother. You remember her house. The tablecloth on the table. An afternoon spent with her. Maybe even a time in your life you hadn’t thought about in a long while.
For a few seconds, you’re not quite in the supermarket anymore. Well, actually, you are in the supermarket… BUT you’re somewhere else at the same time!
That ordinary scent of laundry has just brought back a whole piece of your history.
The current scent isn’t just a simple memory. It brings together several psychological experiences: security, attachment, childhood, and then loss. What was simply the scent of laundry then becomes a meeting point between the present and something much older.
This situation can illustrate the uncanny: something familiar that returns laden with a meaning you may not necessarily be aware of.
Imagine that…
You’re experiencing one of those moments when you feel like something is repeating itself. You think to yourself, “I’ve been through this before.” You change jobs. New company, new people, new office. And yet, a few months later, you find yourself in a situation surprisingly similar to the one you’d experienced before. You think to yourself, “But how did I end up in this situation again?” Of course, no two situations are ever exactly the same. But sometimes, the same scenario seems to keep recurring in different forms.
This pattern is particularly evident in certain relationships.
Clinical Case Study
Émilie, 35, notices that she regularly falls in love with people who gradually become distant. At first, the relationships are different. The people are different. The stories are different. But she always ends up feeling something very familiar: “I get attached, the other person pulls away, and I spend my time trying to figure out what’s going on.”
And eventually she tells herself, “I feel like I’m reliving the same story over and over again with different people.”
This repetition can become unsettling.
Why?
Because it gives us the feeling that something is slipping away from us. Freud was particularly interested in this aspect of involuntary repetition and explains that certain experiences seem to recur even though we haven’t consciously decided to repeat them.
Of course, this doesn’t mean we’re doomed to repeat our past!
But repetition can become an invitation to look with special attention at what is being replayed there.
The familiar: a part of us.
Another important concept in Freud’s work is that of the double.
You may have already met someone who looked surprisingly like you.
Or perhaps you’ve come across an old photograph and had that feeling: “That’s me… but I don’t recognize myself.”
The double is unsettling because it blurs a boundary that is usually very clear: myself and the other.
Clinical Case Study
Thomas, 42, told me during a session that he ran into a man on a train. He didn’t know him. Yet something struck him—the way he spoke, his posture, the way he looked at others. “It was as if I were seeing a version of myself that I didn’t know,” he tells me.
As he talked about this encounter, Thomas gradually realized that this man reminded him of a part of himself that he had long tried to push aside: a way of being that was more assertive, more spontaneous, more visible.
What was strange, then, was not just the resemblance. It was perhaps also the encounter with a part of himself that he recognized without truly recognizing it.
The concept of the double plays an important role in Freud’s (1919) reflections on the Unheimliche and has been the subject of numerous discussions in psychoanalytic literature.
Why does our body sometimes seem a little foreign?
But it’s not just places, smells, or other people...
Our own body, too, can become strange. During adolescence. After a pregnancy. After an illness. After surgery. As we age. Or even after a major physical transformation.
Sometimes we might look at ourselves in the mirror and think: “I know it’s me. But I don’t quite recognize myself.”
This sentence already encapsulates the entire paradox of the uncanny. The body is extremely familiar. It’s our body. We live with it every day. And yet, a transformation can change the way we inhabit it and the way we recognize ourselves in it.
A Clinical Case Study
Sophie, 46, told me during a session: “When I look at myself in the mirror, I know that’s my face. But sometimes I feel like I’m looking at someone else.” She recognizes her face perfectly. But the image she sees no longer quite matches the one she had built of herself.
Her face is still her own. And yet, something has changed: the familiar and the unfamiliar coexist.
Why do certain coincidences give us chills?
You’re thinking about someone. A few minutes later, that person calls you.
You mention a first name you haven’t heard in years. And that very evening, you meet someone with that name.
Or you discover a song you haven’t heard since your teenage years, and it suddenly comes on twice in one day.
Rationally, you know these might just be simple coincidences. But sometimes, the feeling they evoke is surprising, and you find yourself thinking, “That’s still kind of weird…”
Freud was interested in these phenomena of repetition and in the way certain coincidences can take on a particular significance when they echo representations, expectations, or experiences already present in our psychic world. That doesn’t mean these coincidences necessarily have a hidden meaning. But they can affect us because they resonate with something that was already there within us.
So, you might be wondering if everything that seems strange to us is an “uncanny strangeness”?
No.
And that’s important.
Being surprised, feeling afraid, or finding something unusual isn’t enough to call it the uncanny.
The uniqueness of this concept lies precisely in the paradox between the known and the unknown. Something seems foreign to us even though, in one way or another, there is a connection to what is familiar to us.
This is also why two people can experience exactly the same situation in very different ways. A song might leave one person indifferent while deeply moving another. A house may seem reassuring to one person and strangely unsettling to another. An encounter may seem mundane to one person and deeply unsettling to another.
Our personal history shapes the way we perceive what happens to us.
The uncanny is sometimes an invitation to get to know ourselves better...
The uncanny doesn’t necessarily require us to find an explanation right away. It may simply invite us to pause for a moment.
To notice what moves us. To ask ourselves:
- Why did this situation affect me so much?
- What does this remind me of?
- Is this feeling really new to me?
- Is there something that keeps repeating itself in my life?
- What about this situation feels both familiar and unfamiliar to me?
The idea isn’t to go looking for a “hidden memory” at all costs. Nor is it to view every coincidence as a sign. And certainly not to impose a ready-made interpretation on what we’re feeling.
Rather, it’s about making room for curiosity. Because sometimes, an emotion we don’t immediately understand may simply be signaling that something deserves a closer look.
What the uncanny can bring into question
Ultimately, this is what Freud invites us to consider with this concept.
- We can love someone and resent them at the same time.
- We can be happy and afraid at the same time.
- Be attached to a place and feel the need to leave it.
- To recognize our own body and yet no longer quite recognize ourselves in it.
- To be in a familiar place and, for a few seconds, find it strange.
Two contradictory experiences can sometimes coexist without one canceling out the other. This uncanny strangeness reminds us that our inner world isn’t always as simple as we’d like it to be. And perhaps there’s nothing unusual about that. After all, we are beings in constant evolution, in motion, in flux.
What we have experienced can take on new meaning.
What we thought we’d left behind may resurface.
And what once seemed foreign to us may, one day, become familiar. Perhaps getting to know ourselves better isn’t about understanding everything immediately. Perhaps it sometimes begins simply with this sentence: “That’s strange… what does this stir within me?”
Bibliography:
Freud, S. (1919), The Uncanny (Das Unheimliche).
The concept of the Unheimliche has been taken up and discussed by numerous psychoanalytic authors, particularly in relation to the themes of the double, repetition, repression, the body, and the boundaries between the familiar and the foreign; but it has also been explored by other contemporary authors, whom we will examine in Part 2 shortly.