The Impact Of Sigmund Freud's Thesis On The Uncanny Essay On Art Culture

When a person experiences chills or goose bumps as a reaction to something strange or unusual, they are being affected by a sense of uncanniness. The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud endeavored to explain this feeling of uncanniness in his essay entitled “The Uncanny”. Freud’s theory focuses around two different causes for this reaction. Freud attributes the feeling of uncanniness to repressed infantile complexes that have been revived by some impression, or when primitive beliefs that have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed. The first point of his theory that Freud discusses in the essay is the repression of infantile complexes that cause an uncanny experience.

Sigmund Freud coined this term when trying to explain something strangely familiar yet unfamiliar. It speaks to seeing or experiencing new but also takes us back to our own psychological past or something within the material world. It is suddenly recognizing something that seems unfamiliar and in fact, has an identity

Blade Runner, the classic sci-fi noir movie by Hampton Fincher and David Peoples, is a futuristic perspective on slavery, humanity, and the rights of thinking beings. In the movie, Deckard, a blade runner and the main character of the story, hunts down Nexus 6 replicants: androids imposed with superhuman strength and nearly human intelligence who have gone rogue (2, 10). These androids are given a four-year lifespan to prevent them from developing human emotions which way throughout the movie to further complicate the balance between androids and humans (6). Throughout the movie, the line between humanity and inhumanity becomes thinner and better, causing problems for Deckard and Tyrell Corporation. In its entirety, Blade Runner is attempting to get the audience to decide whether replicants deserve the same freedom and rights as humans. To help the audience in their decision, the movie proved information about the supposedly "inhumane" replicants and their human creators.

As I stood staring at such a life-like sculpture in the confines of a briskly chilly art museum corridor, I could only imagine the amount of exhausted nights the sculptor had to endure to create his extremely exhausted masterpiece. The sculptor Duane Hanson and his piece “The Football Player” most-certainly shared the same facial expression at one point in their existence, as to

The film text Bladerunner is rich with confrontational ideas about human nature and technology. Made in 1982 and set in 2019, Ridley Scott the director uses clever cinematography and soundtrack to develop his ideas; successfully illustrating a harsh but feasible future. The most significant and vital theme that Scott incorporates is the theme ‘what does it mean to be human’ best encompassed by the famous phrase ‘I think therefore I am’. The relationship between technology and human nature is also shown under this theme as Scott tries to challenge the audience with some of the ethical and social issues faced in the world he has created, a world where the line between real and fake has been blurred.

Vertigo is an intriguing film throwing several philosophical themes at the viewer, including the ideas of love, appearance/reality, and subjective/objective personality. By the use of camera shots, editing, colour, and more, Vertigo provides viewers to immerse themselves into these themes and ponder over what these messages mean and apply to their individual ways of thinking. An interesting concept from the film that I want to dwell on more is the theme of appearance vs. reality. The film creates a conflict between these two opposites, mainly by the physical form of Gavin Elster’s wife “Madeleine” (also known as accessory to murder “Judy”) to the protagonist of the film, John “Scottie” Ferguson as he tries to unravel the mystery of who she really is.

Each piece attempts to bait the viewer to linger, gaze, and engage in a moment of meditation on the state of their own waking consciousness—and the shadowy abstractions that lurk beneath.

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City the painting “Joan of Arc” by Jules Bastien-Lepage hangs in the B. Gerald Cantor Sculpture Gallery. This Piece is rather large and was done with oil paint on canvas, its dimensions being approximately eight feet tall with a width of ten feet. When walking toward Bastien-Lapage’s painting, it’s size and realism grabs one’s attention, and then holds it while this scene of Joan of Arc seems to take place right before one’s eyes.

I could not agree more with Freud’s opinion on artist’s. Artist’s come in many forms but almost all are subject to a kind of guiltless and sexually liberated state-of-being that the general public is not accustomed to. There is little that artist’s feel the need to hide, as most of their urges and fantasies can be expressed without shame in their projects. I think we can decidedly agree that poets, painters, writers, sculptors, etc. are all members of this group and can be considered bohemian and outlandish in comparison to their peers.

Freud’s concept of the “uncanny” is a highly influential and valued in psychoanalysis and literature. As Freud explains, it reveals much about his understanding of human beings as being essentially determined by their fears and unconscious desires. His interpretation of uncanny can be analyzed in two ways: linguistic and actual. In the beginning, he starts with the term “uncanny”, which is taken from German word “unheimlich”, literally meaning “un-home-like” – something unfamiliar and unknown, never experienced before. The problem is that the definition of the word and the linguistic peculiarities take half of the whole reading, so we get to the point after the second half.

Another work that illustrates this sensorial experience are Asher’s two pieces in 1969; one at the Newport Harbor Art Museum in their “the Appearing/Disappearing Image/Object” show, and the other at the Whitney Museum of American Art in their “Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials”

Sigmund Freud's revolutionary ideas have set the standard for modern psychoanalysis in which students of psychology can learn from his ideas spread from the field of medicine to daily living. His studies in areas such as unconsciousness, dreams, sexuality, the Oedipus complex, and sexual maladjustments laid the foundation for future studies. In result, better understanding of the small things, which shape our lives.

Our contemporary world is dominated by digital representation and as a result, has fused our notion of ‘self’ with the image. Imaging technologies, such as the video, creates a “spatial distance, a gap between the subject/object… This distance ‘allows the subject to treat the Other as object; in short, it makes objectification possible.” (Jones, “Self/Image” 19). The feminine subject often is trapped as the object for male viewing desire. The objectification of the female has long history in feminist psychoanalytic theory, specifically analyzed in Julia Kristeva’s essay, Powers of Horror: An essay on Abjection. Kristeva outlines her theories about ‘the abject’, claiming that it is something we reject as so disgusting, allowing one to separate oneself from what they are not. She goes on to discuss Freud’s theory of the ‘Oedipal complex’, which labels the abject as being in between the object and subject, in order for the child to separate from the maternal, and create their own identity. The need to separate oneself from the mother is prevalent throughout our psyches and the phallocentric order. Thus, resulting in imaging technologies re-enforcing the patterns of our socially established gender discriminations.

Women have played a very important role in the development of psychology, though they are not recognized as major contributors. In this paper we are going to be focusing on the works and contribution of Anna Freud. She is known for her construction of child psychoanalysis theory and her interpretation of child psychology. Anna Freud (1895-1982) is famous as being involved in the foundation of the child psychoanalytic movement. She was the youngest of Freud’s children and the only one to whose life was devoted to psychoanalysis. Her development of child psychoanalysis has been greatly noted in the history of psychology. Anna Freud kept the basic ideas that her father developed. However, her interest laid in the psyche and how it was constructed. She also took interest in the where the ego stood in the structure of the psyche. She saw the ego as the “seat of observation”; it is from the ego that we can clearly see how the