Ellenberger

Henri Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious
53-74 Gassner and Mesmer. Enlightenment rationalism emerging in challenge to Gassner's "preternaturalist" explanation of "possession"; Mesmer's "rational"explanation of "animal magnetism." Mesmer's obscure involvement in politics 1785-1815. The notion that slave rebellion and thus Haitian independence were inspired by a mesmeric fad.
(Curiously, I dreamt of Haiti last night before reading about this this morning:
I am sitting in on a class at the Corcoran. The instructor doesn't know I'm also an instructor, and I'm appalled by her behavior: She keeps the class waiting while she finishes a personal phone during class time; she seems unsure and unconcerned about requirements and due dates; she seems to have a superficial grasp of her subject. Cory Hixson, Bob Devers, and Richard Wilkerson are sitting there, too, and all sort of acknowledge this isn't good but also "what can you do?" The instructor switches on a television for us to watch a video. On the screen I see a report about poverty, hunger, and political unrest in Haiti. There is an image of a kind of sculpture: a wooden board that has a largish metal bomb mounted on it pointing downwards, a bullet-shaped bomb with a tail, like a cartoon bomb dropped by a plane, very rusty, surmounted by a smaller bomb of the same shape, also pointing downwards. Mounted above the bomb are some leaves and vines, other things like twine, making a pattern that suggests a loincloth, like the bombs represent a cache-sexe holding a very large penis. The title is "Il met son front sur le fronton," and I understand that this means that the sculpture is a daring political joke about the military dictator, who has a phallic idea of power.
BTW, I immediately associate the loincloth with watching Walkabout last night, and the dictator (partly through the leaves and vines) with Bush, and my feeling that he is all balls, all nerve, with nothing else to back it up.
After I wake up, I don't know what the French phrase means. I have to look it up to get the sense it could mean "He puts his face (forehead) on a monument."
77-101 German Romantics - Clemens Brentano's book of the visions of Katharina Emmerich - The Seeress of Prevorst (von Eschenmayer?) - Kerner's inkblots (which could be a key precursor of the uncanny use of photography) - spiritualism - Bernheim against Charcot
Chapter 3 110-174 Multiple personalities, doubles (dipsychism)
Chapter 4 The philosophical and ideological background

The point of this is to depict the growth of cinema and psychoanalysis not just as coincident and changing the cultural conception and place of images in similar and related ways, but to see both as growing out of changing assumptions in the previous centuries--about the nature of perception, imagination, ansd representation--and particularly to emphasize the contribution of "fringe" phenomena - hypnotism, spiritualism, secret societies, esoteric knowledge, the faddish ideas both Freud and Jung took up - as a kind of popular avant-garde in signifying and even bring about change.
(It's just because of the failure to recognize the significance of such movements that liberal democrats and academics failed to understand the power of Christian fundamentalism, or that a fathead like Fukuyama was able to declare history done with even as Islamic fundamentalism was gathering momentum. The issue is a continuing profound inability to appreciate the role of the irrational in political and cultural life, and thus to understand cultural change in terms of the role of the unconscious. What is usually done is [still] hand-wringing over reason confronting unreason, as if one side were more reasonable than the other, as if one side was not subject to unconscious motivation, as if [with Freud] the id could be replaced by ego.)
As with politics and culture generally, a real appreciation of the unconscious changes understanding of the nature of cinema fundamentally, and not according to the specious models of Metz, Baudry, or Eberwein.

A Man Killed by His Dream

The Zuo Zhuan (about fifth century BC) tells the story of Shushun Bao of Lu, who traveled to Qi to meet his bride. Along the way he stopped at Geng Zong, where he met a woman who offered to bring him food. He spent the night with her.
Sometime after the birth of his two sons by the woman from Qi, he dreamed that the heavens were falling on him and crushing him to death. He called for help and saw a small, deformed man. "Niu (cow-like)!" he cried, "Help me!" But Niu did not assist him; he stood aside and watched. Shushun Bao pushed hard against the heavens and escaped. When he awoke he described the man in his dream and told his councillors to beware of him.
Years later he determined to return home from Qi to Lu. Along the way he stopped at Geng Zong, where the woman he had met long ago presented him with his son. "Niu," Shushun Bao said, before introductions could be made. "Yes," said the boy.
Niu accompanied Shushun Bao to Lu, where under the guise of protecting his father, he arranged the execution of his older half-brother and the exile of the younger. Attending his father Shushun Bao in illness, he withheld his medicine and watched as he died.

Since You Asked

I think the classic definitions of the uncanny differentiate it from horror (and terror) as these are defined by one's physical responses to the object (whatever theories people have about the psychological sources of those feelings). The uncanny is both supernatural and disturbing or eerie--that is, one the one hand, it's defined by being inexplicable according to the ordinary operations of nature (thus, a rotting corpse is not uncanny though it may be an object of horror); on the other, by not being very nice (therefore miracles and God are not uncanny).

Freud's way of looking at the uncanny is interesting and very influential: It makes the familiar strange through some transformation that is generally to be explained as a psychological mechanism of defense, denial, alienation, and thus undermines our sense of the reality of reality, or ability to discern the real from the imagined, illusory, or subjective. Thus, typical uncanny themes are ghosts (much better when they are the ghosts of someone known); vampires (ditto, as they generally are in classic folklore); zombies (which confuse the categories or life and death); doppelgaengers (isn't that me? But I'm me!! Aaaaaagh!!!!). That's why my list tends to things like The Turn of the Screw, which are very decidedly ghost stories without necessarily being in the horror genre. Bartleby is interesting because, like Kafka and Borges, it skirts the issue of the supernatural. I am especially interested in situations where the uncanny effect is created not primarily by the device of a ghost, etc., but by a literary technique such as multiple points of view (as in Dracula or Rashomon), nesting of stories (as in The Manuscript Found at Saragossa), or weird narrative puzzles (as in Ubik). Personally, I think Stephen King is a very good writer of horror novels but only occasionally really interested in the uncanny, and then the effect is forced; Phillip K. Dick and Peter Straub are just deeply attracted to the uncanny. The title of Emmanuel Carrere's biography of Dick is pretty uncanny itself; at least it's extremely eerie: I Am Alive and You are Dead.

Unlike the basic category of the horror novel or film, the category of the uncanny fits pretty well with other things I teach, try to read up on, and hope to write more about: the nature of dreams; the theme of cannibalism in psychodynamics, esp. of childhood; and the identity issues posed by artificial persons in novels and film. On the latter, I think there's a lot in genuine philosophy and cultural theory lately, but very little that's psychodynamically oriented, so recognizing the continuity between , say, Blade Runner and Edgar Allan Poe on the living dead, automata, and doubles could be kind of interesting.

Dreyer, Vampyr

The Uncanny

I've been considering proposing a course on The Uncanny in Film and Lit. Unfortunately, I don't have time right now to go into why I'm feeling "The Uncanny" helps me to get at something I couldn't do with a course on Horror or The Gothic, but it basically comes down to seeing The Uncanny as an issue in representation rather than underlying beliefs--that is, the supernatural premise or incident is treated as defining subject matter and context for conventions in an analysis of the Gothic novel or the horror film, but I want to get instead at the creation of the sensation of the uncanny (and the conventions and premises, etc.) through the limitations and possibilities of representation, in narrative fiction and film. (Admittedly, this what a lot of theory-heads would do anyway, but I would be happier starting things out rightside-up by turning the conventional assumptions about the relation between reality and representation in art upside-down to begin with--that is, to admit, that supernatural belief is a function of narrative rather than assuming that narrative conveys supernatural belief.)
One reason I know this would be interesting for me to do is that the list of texts comes so easily:

Fiction
E. T. A. Hoffman
Keats - the gothic poerms
Poe (M. Valdemar, The Black Cat, The Tale-Tale Heart, Ligeia, William Wilson, a lot of others, really)
Washington Irving - The Stranger with a Bag, maybe Sleepy Hollow
Hogg - Private Memoirs and Confessions
Eliot - The Lifted Veil
Potocki - The Manuscript Found at Saragossa
Dostoevsky - The Double
Melville - Bartleby?
James - The Turn of the Screw, The Friends of the Friends
Dracula (esp. the uncanniness created by multiple and partial views)
Stevenson - Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
M. R. James, E. F. Benson
Six Characters in Search of an Author
Kafka - In the Penal Colony
Borges, Calvino
Shirley Jackson, Muriel Spark
Dick - Ubik, The Man in the High Castle
Peter Straub - Ghost Story
This leaves out, among other things, excerpting Montaigne, Thomas Browne, Robert Burton on considering the uncanny; and probably some orientation to the influence of Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet on the Romantics' sense of the Uncanny. It'd be nice to find something in Hazlitt and DeQuincey.

Film

The Golem
The Student of Prague
Vampyr
The Dybbuk
Cat People
The Uninvited
Ugetsu
Rashomon
Kwaidan
Vertigo
Psycho
The Innocents
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Les diaboliques
Rosemary's Baby
Total Recall
And in art generally, there'd be Goya, Fuseli, the Pre-Raphaelites, Surrealism, the Chapmans, Tony Oursler . . .

Key issues: This'd let me go into:
Anomalous psychological experience
Threats to identity
Dead/Alive
Real/Unreal
Doubles
Mulitiplicity of view, subjectivity, transcendentalism
Metaphysical paradox
Self-reference and Romantic irony
Gender and sexuality
I wouldn't base it on Freud, but a psychoanalytic view especially with a lot of Klein (reparation as haunting) would be good. Todorov. Mary Douglas probably has something relevant, too; structuralism is a very good approach for establishing the Uncanny.
I'd be very happy to have the chance to go into this while thinking about some of the films (I've never written up my talk on The Dybbuk for an article) and working on the Double novel.