READING FREUD
The Uncanny
Four Sessions
September 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 will 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 will meet on Zoom, and Eugénie will read the text out-loud, line-by-line, with commentary and context.
There is no expectation of prior knowledge, and there will be plenty of time for discussion, development and (Lacanian) contextualising.
Dates and times
Monday 7 September
Monday 14 September
Monday 21 September
Monday 28 September
7:00 pm Melbourne time (AEST)
Find your local start time here.
Recordings and materials
The sessions will be recorded and viewed by a wide audience. Registrants will receive each recording by email, and will have access to Freud’s text, Eugénie’s PowerPoint presentations, and the supplementary materials as they accumulate.
Pictured below is page 1 of Freud’s handwritten manuscript, Das Unheimliche.
We will read from the recently published Revised Standard Edition, Volume XVII, and this text will be shared with participants.
The Uncanny is published as a short book in many formats, 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