The Psychological Uncanny

Abstract

Before Freud proposed a theoretical basis for understanding the vagaries of human behaviour the realm of the unconscious, or the subconscious as it was often called, provided a mysterious territory between the conscious mind and the possibility of some further existence. In The Varieties of Religious Experience , in an attempt to understand the visionary state, William James described the subconscious as filled with insignificant memories like a Sargasso Sea, but still giving the sense of some other life of the soul beyond its shore: Let me propose, then, as an hypothesis, that whatever it may be on its farther side, the ‘more’ with which in religious experience we feel ourselves connected is on its hither side the subconscious continuation of our conscious life. and: The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely ‘understandable’ world. 1 The idea of an extension of human experience beyond the limits of the body and the senses was inherent in the doctrines of American Transcendentalism; These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.