West World

Leo Cookman performs an Unheimlich manoeuvre to review a disturbing android saga.

- Leo Cookman

Uncanny is a word with which we’re all familiar, but perhaps slightly misunderstand. We often say that when something or someone is similar to another something or someone, the resemblance is ‘uncanny’, especially if it is one person doing an impression of another. In many ways this is accurate, but it’s normally used in a positive way in this instance. “It’s uncanny!” we may say in wonder. However, when something is truly uncanny there are few things more unsettling.

The concept of ‘the uncanny’ has been explored for centuries, but it was popularised by Ernst Jentsch in his essay On the Psychology of the Uncanny (1906) and Sigmund Freud in Das Unheimliche [The Uncanny] (1919). It is the idea of something that is familiar but just outside the realms of being the same. The etymology of the word ‘uncanny’ stems from the AngloSaxon ken (still used in the Scots dialect) meaning ‘understanding or knowledge’; thus ‘uncanny’ is ‘outside of understanding’. Essentially it is something we do not quite understand.

We all know the feeling of the uncanny when someone or something is not quite right. People have reported feeling this in the presence of psychopaths who act in a socially acceptable manner but whom they can instinctively tell are pretending. The disjunct is unsettling. This aligns with an idea that our sense of the uncanny may have evolved in order to help us avoid dangers revealed by that which is ‘not quite right’, including selecting better mates. It’s posited that this also ties in with our dislike of seeing a cadaver; something that looks human but which has no life inside it.