"I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding-Night": Lacan and the Uncanny

The dimension of the uncanny, introduced by Freud in his famous paper, is located at the very core of psychoanalysis.' It is the dimension where all the concepts of psychoanalysis come together, where its diverse lines of argument form a knot. The uncanny provides a clue to the basic project of psychoanalysis. And yet Freud appears to be somewhat at a loss about how to make use of this clue. Although he enumerates a number of instances of the uncanny, giving an array of examples embellished with theoretical reflections, he leaves us in the end with only a sketch or a prolegomenon to a theory of the uncanny. Exactly how the different pieces fit together remains unclear.