READING FREUD
The Uncanny
September and October 2026
Presented by Eugénie Austin
Freud’s 1919 essay The Uncanny explores the peculiar form of anxiety that arises when we are confronted with something both familiar and strange — at once heimlich (home-like) and unheimlich (un-home-like). Moving through literature, childhood fears, doubles (doppelgängers) and superstition, Freud asks how and why certain experiences disturb us precisely because they seem, somehow, already known.
“I will say at once that the ‘uncanny’ is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, something once very familiar.” Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny
We consider the uncanny in relation to ambivalence, repression and its return, anxiety, repetition compulsion, doubles, ghosts and death, with plenty of Lacanian contextualising.
“The Unheimliche is what appears at the place where the minus phi should be … because there is no image of lack.” Jacques Lacan, Seminar X, Anxiety
Free, online, open to all and recorded
How it works
We meet on Zoom, and Eugénie reads the text aloud, line-by-line, with commentary and context.
There is no expectation of prior knowledge, and we give plenty of time to discussion, development and (Lacanian) contextualising.
Recordings and materials
The sessions are recorded and the most recent are available below.
Participants can access the ‘Uncanny Drive’ for the earlier recordings, Freud’s text, Eugénie’s PowerPoint slides, and other relevant supplementary materials.
Week 5, 5 October 2026
The Compulsion to Repeat
Week 4, 28 September 2026
The Double
Week 3, 21 September 2026
Freud on The Sand-Man
Pictured below is page 1 of Freud’s handwritten manuscript, Das Unheimliche.
We are reading from the recently published Revised Standard Edition, Volume XVII, and this text is available for participants.
The Uncanny is published as a short book in more than 70 editions and 20 translations, including those shown below (click the images for the Amazon listings).
Visit our previous Freud Reading here: Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis
Visit our current Lacan Reading here: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis
Everything is free and open to all
Artwork by Max Ernst, The Robing of the Bride, 1940; reproduced on the cover of the Penguin Classics edition of The Uncanny