Sigmund Freud’s essay on the uncanny described the long-familiar phenomenon of something deeply unsettling that could be hiding in seemingly familiar objects and situations. More than a century since its publication, it continues to inspire some artists to create disquieting and complex work that explores our deep fears and anxieties. Read on to learn more about Sigmund Freud’s uncanny and its reflection in art.

What is Uncanny According to Sigmund Freud?

In 1919, Sigmund Freud published one of his most famous essays The Uncanny, exploring the notion and its effect on the human psyche. Over the years, the essay became popular among not only psychoanalysts but also writers and artists who wanted to explore and exploit the uncanny effect.

The first part of his essay dealt with specific German adjectives heimlich and unheimlich, directly translated as homely and unhomely. From these notions, the English translation originated. Heimlich could be loosely explained as familiar or homely, something controlled and tamed, bringing a pleasant feeling of understanding. Unheimlich, by this logic, refers to something opposite, which still has the connotations of something familiar although not comforting. As if it was supposed to comfort you but instead evoked feelings of terror and discomfort.

To experience the uncanny is to see something that was supposed to be hidden, to discover something unsettling in an otherwise familiar object. It might be something too realistic—or, as with dolls, mannequins, and humanoid robots, something desperately attempting to be realistic but failing at it. In this unsuccessful mimicry, these objects gain a surprising power to scare, manipulate, and highlight human insecurities. According to Freud, these feelings can originate from the rise of various social taboos, especially related to violence and sexuality. Read on to learn more about artworks inspired by the uncanny.

1. Hans Bellmer: The Doll Series

Perhaps one of the most literal and direct expressions of the Uncanny concept, Hans Bellmer’s project The Doll spanned almost his entire life. A talented designer and illustrator, Bellmer started to make obscure grotesque dolls after his native Germany fell under the Nazi influence. Quietly protesting the oppressive morals and beauty standards set by Third Reich propaganda, Bellmer created his dolls highly sexualized, intentionally dysfunctional, and unsettling. A doll within itself is a powerful expression of the uncanny according to Freud, as it looks similar to a human being but nonetheless failed at achieving exact likeness.

Bellmer’s dolls had all the attributes of a sexualized femininity, yet the artist brought them to grotesque and repulsive lengths. In their maximized sexual allure, the figures become threatening, turning from an erotic fantasy into a violent nightmare. Devoid of personality and human feeling, these figures replace them with aggression and primal impulses.

2. Ron Mueck: A Girl

Australian artist Ron Mueck is known for his hyper-realistic sculptures of humans, which seem too naturalistic. He usually creates his figures much larger than life-sized. He started as a prop artist and puppet maker for TV shows and gradually developed it into full-time artistic practice. Mueck uses artificial materials like fiberglass, silicone, and resin to create incredibly convincing yet unsettling images of humans. According to the artist, his goal is to explore characters and emotions. Yet, many viewers feel discomfort from being exposed to their own physicality and the incredibly successful mimicry of the artificial.

Mueck creates his feeling of the uncanny through the zoomed-in physicality of his figures. Pores, facial hairs, and wrinkles are clearly visible in his works, as he never tries to make them more visually appealing than in reality. He never works with life-size figures because, as Mueck says, he meets life-sized humans every day and has no interest in recreating them. A change in scale somehow highlights many details that remained ignored in reality. Thus, these details create an unsettling sense of the uncanny—they are too realistic to be artificial, yet their size and positioning in a museum space hint at their true nature.

3. Sarah Lucas: Pauline Bunny

Sarah Lucas explores gender boundaries and their representation in the media through crude imagery and irony. She belongs to the group of the YBAs (Young British Artists) who were united not by their style or subject matter but by their desire to exhibit together outside of traditional institutions. These artists were also endorsed by the famous art collector and businessman Charles Saatchi.

Lucas’ famous series of Bunnies—figures made from stuffed tights and stockings—originated almost accidentally. According to the artist, she had no clear intention or plan when she created the first work, yet was so intrigued by the result that she turned it into a long-term project. Similarly to Bellmer’s dolls, Lucas’ Bunnies are strange and dysfunctional, blending together femininity, sexuality, and the uncanny effect of a living being that was not supposed to be alive. Even the soft, tactile impression of the stuffed hosiery does not make the figures more welcoming. They appear at once to be strange forms of life, fetish objects, and plush toys. All these contradicting functions make them confusing and threatening.

4. Edward Kienholz: The Beanery

The underappreciated American artist Edward Kienholz spent most of his career working with installations, many of which created the immersive effect of a viewer participating in the scene represented. Growing up on a remote farm, he mastered the skills of carpentry and construction, which enabled him to create large-scale and detailed installations all on his own. Over the years, Kienholz’s works were criticized for being too uncomfortable and disturbing to watch and experience.

Kienholz’s famous installation The Beanery was a slightly smaller reconstruction of the notorious bar Barney’s Beanery in Los Angeles. The artist replicated it almost completely, with homophobic signs hung around the space and the smell of urine and stale beer. The viewer, forced to enter the installations, encounters a deeply unsettling group of bar regulars seemingly staring at the newcomer. All their heads are replaced with clocks with no eyes or mouths. Kienholtz recreated space where no time existed and where people came to escape or kill it. The non-temporality, the unsettling physical senses, and the horrifying lack of faces in the crowd created a nightmarish effect of the uncanny.

5. Gregory Crewdson: Untitled

The American photographer Gregory Crewdson found the uncanny in small things. As a former psychology student, he knows how to construct a sense of unease in seemingly familiar and comforting situations. He frequently uses nudity as a marker of something inherently wrong in his compositions. In situations that do not usually involve the presence of a naked body (such as a normative and unremarkable family dinner with a hint of tension between family members), the sudden appearance of realistic physicality turns into a signal for danger, tragedy, or horror. The feeling of unsafety within one’s own home is one of the most effective and traumatizing methods of provoking fear, and Crewdson makes perfect use of it.

6. Cindy Sherman: Untitled #302

According to Freud, dolls are something we perceive as alive in our childhood by playing with them, but as we grow up, this link gets lost. Dolls fall into the category of the inanimate, which is certainly not supposed to show any signs of being alive. Thus, adults’ interactions with dolls stir up old memories and experiences that have no place in the psyche of a grown human, thus producing terror.

Cindy Sherman, the master of mimicry and self-portraiture, has turned herself into dolls, celebrities, and pop culture characters over the entire length of her career. In 1994, she created a series of works incorporating mannequins disassembled and built anew into something odd. These large dolls, initially created to fuel one’s desire to buy and consume, lose their appeal and turn into haunting creatures.

7. The Works of Louise Bourgeois and Sigmund Freud’s Uncanny

British psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell dubbed Bourgeois Freud’s Daughter for her inherent connection to his method of psychoanalysis in her art. Her art was entirely subjective and based on her own traumas and experiences. Simultaneously, it triggered personal associations among members of the audience, who were interacting with her works. In that sense, the uncanny effect manifests itself in Bourgeois’ work through uncertainty and vagueness. All sorts of disturbing, erotic, or borderline traumatizing associations can arise from her works. In their versatility, they seem to gain an unsettling power over the viewer’s psyche.

Louise Bourgeois was well familiar with Freud’s writing and methodology. Still, however, she believed that it was insufficient and not entirely suitable for artists. To be an artist for Bourgeois is to experience suffering that could not be properly addressed with psychoanalytic methods.