Sense

“No doubt that the feeling of something uncanny is directly attached to the figure of the Sand-Man, that is, to the idea of being robbed of one’s eyes, and that Jentsch’s point of an intellectual uncertainty has nothing to do with this effect.”

This sentence and the example of a child’s delusions helped me further understand the complexity of the uncanny. The word itself is identified by Freud as something “frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar,” and it perfectly describes how I feel standing in complete darkness by myself. The darkness is something I’m familiar with, but when my eyes can’t adjust to the dark my mind tends to wander in order to make up for the sense I’m lacking. The uncanny/dreadful feeling sets in when I start imagining something unknown exisiting in the darkness. Rationality is lost even though, logically, there is no one with me.

Nonsense

“Biology has not yet been able to decide whether death is the inevitable fate of every living being or whether it is only a regular but yet perhaps avoidable event in life.”

When Freud mentioned this in his essay I thought it was absurd to think that death is an “avoidable event in life.” I can’t imagine a world where people can escape death by creating dopplegangers. After the original is gone, the copies are not exact copies and acquire different purposes.