#Resource Freud's 1919 essay, and the feeling it named: not the merely strange, but the strange **recovered** — the *heimlich* homely turning *unheimly*, unhomely. The uncanny is what happens when something repressed returns, most of all infantile helplessness and the animist convictions we have outgrown: waxworks, automata, doubles, the lifeless that seems alive and the living that seems dead. (The "uncanny valley" of robot design sits exactly on that animate/inanimate border.) ## The Uncanny in Landscape The psychoanalytic account of landscape runs through this feeling. Storms and mountains were *literally* frightening — they are the infant's experience of overwhelming nature — so their return in adult perception is uncanny in Freud's precise sense: the helplessness is repressed, not gone. What turns uncanniness into pleasure is the aesthetic attitude: regression made reversible ([[Anton Ehrenzweig]]), the survived object of [[Melanie Klein]]'s [[Depressive Position]], horror held at distance in the [[Sublime]]. Where the regression is *not* survivable, the feeling stays uncanny — and that is a fair description of the present weather of the mind: [[Solastalgia]] is the uncanny applied to place itself, the home turned unhomely, the sea that has stopped behaving as the sea. The object of [[Ambiguous Loss]] is uncanny in the same way: present, but no longer the thing it was. ## In the Forest - [[Sublime]] · [[Oceanic Feeling]] — the tamed and inverted forms of the same dissolution. - [[The Motherliness of Nature]] — the essay whose hinge is uncanniness-flipped-to-beauty. - [[Melanie Klein]] · [[Introjection and Projection]] — how the frightening object gets into the landscape in the first place. - [[Solastalgia]] · [[Ambiguous Loss]] · [[Grief]] — the feeling in climate keys. `Concepts:` [[Sublime]] · [[Oceanic Feeling]] · [[Introjection and Projection]] `Knowledge Base:` [[Painting]]