Uncanniness — the German Unheimlichkeit, literally ‘not-at-home-ness’ — occupies a decisive position in the depth-psychological corpus, functioning simultaneously as an ontological, phenomenological, and psychodynamic category. Heidegger furnishes the most systematic treatment: in Being and Time, uncanniness names the primordial condition of thrownness in which Dasein, stripped of its everyday absorption in the ‘they,’ confronts the nullity of its ground. Anxiety is its vehicle, and the ‘call of conscience’ its occasion; uncanniness thus becomes the very disclosure-structure of authentic selfhood. Rudolf Otto traces a cognate phenomenon in the religious domain, locating in the ‘feeling of something uncanny’ the germinal form of numinous dread from which all daemonic and divine representation grows — a thesis that situates uncanniness at the origin of religious history itself. Erich Neumann extends the concept into depth psychology proper, reading the uncanniness of neurotic and psychotic manifestation as the triumph of the unconscious over ego-consciousness. Walter F. Otto and Irvin Yalom invoke the term, respectively, to characterise virginal nature’s irreducible strangeness and the existential groundlessness encountered in desert-place experiences. Across these registers, uncanniness is never mere aesthetic eeriness but a threshold phenomenon: the point at which familiar world-structures collapse and the being of existence presses forward undisguised.
This uncanniness pursues Dasein constantly, and is a threat to its everyday lostness in the ‘they’, though not explicitly.
Heidegger establishes uncanniness as a permanent, structural feature of Dasein’s thrown Being-in-the-world, one that anxiety discloses and that the ‘they’ ordinarily suppresses.
, Being and Time, 1962thesis
Dasein, in the very basis of its Being, is care… indeed, recourse to these is so far from clarifying the uncanniness of the call that instead it annihilates it.
Heidegger argues that recourse to entities other than Dasein cannot explain the uncanniness of conscience’s call, which arises from Dasein’s own thrown individuation.
, Being and Time, 1962thesis
It first begins to stir in the feeling of ‘something uncanny’, ‘eerie’, or ‘weird’. It is this feeling which, emerging in the mind of primeval man, forms the starting-point for the entire religious development in history.
Rudolf Otto identifies the feeling of uncanniness as the primordial seed of numinous dread, the root from which all daemonic representation, divinity, and mythological fantasy branch.
, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, 1917thesis
it is already ‘there’, and yet nowhere; it is so close that it is oppressive and stifles one’s breath, and yet it is nowhere.
Heidegger phenomenologically characterises anxiety’s threatening ‘nothing and nowhere’ as the structure that makes uncanniness manifest — a proximity without locatable object.
, Being and Time, 1962thesis
The uncanniness of all such neurotic and psychotic manifestations — which correspond to a ‘dysfunction’ of the
Neumann locates uncanniness in the displacement of ego-consciousness by the unconscious, reading neurotic and psychotic phenomena as sites where the familiar ego-world becomes alien.
, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019thesis
the entity by which both these structures are filled in is the same, namely Dasein… that in the face of which one has anxiety is not encountered as something definite with which one can concern oneself.
Heidegger clarifies that anxiety and uncanniness coincide in Dasein as the same entity confronting its own groundlessness rather than any object within the world.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
on uncanniness, 45; on unconcealment, 353
Yalom’s index situates Heidegger’s treatment of uncanniness as a named reference point within existential psychotherapy’s engagement with death, guilt, and authentic being.
, Existential Psychotherapy, 1980supporting
of what Dasein finds itself alongside in uncanniness: H. 188
The Being and Time index entry confirms uncanniness as the specific locus at which Dasein’s thrownness becomes disclosed to itself, linking it to Being-in-the-world and inauthentic Being.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
virginal, free nature with its brilliance and wildness, with its guiltless purity and its uncanniness.
Walter F. Otto applies uncanniness to the goddess Artemis and the domain of untamed nature, characterising it as an irreducible, non-maternal wildness that resists human appropriation.
, The Homeric Gods: The Spiritual Significance of Greek Religion, 1929supporting
its character is determined by thrownness as a Fact of the entity which it is; and, as so determined, it has in each case already been delivered over to existence.
Heidegger grounds the caller of conscience in factical thrownness, the same structure that generates uncanniness, tying the two concepts indissolubly together.
, Being and Time, 1962supporting
When one falls into one’s own ‘desert places,’ the
Yalom illustrates the existential isolation and groundlessness that functions phenomenologically as uncanniness, drawn from Frost’s image of inner desert spaces.
, Existential Psychotherapy, 1980aside
I felt unnaturally fatigued, as I had never felt before.
Jung’s first-person account of a haunted-house encounter registers the bodily and affective toll of an uncanny experience, illustrating the phenomenon’s psychological reality without theorising it directly.
, Collected Works Volume 18: The Symbolic Life, 1976aside