A psychoanalytic perspective on the ‘foreigner’ and the ‘uncanny’ of cognitive psychology

Starting from the Freud’s text ‘The uncanny’, this paper aims to reflect on the uncanny in psychoanalysis and apply it to the reading of the social experience of strangeness that our communities experience with regard to the ‘foreigner’. For this purpose, various psychoanalytic perspectives on the uncanny are investigated and the Lacanian approach to the question of the Real is further explored. We also deal with cognitive social psychology that has developed interpretative models and intervention methods concerning the migratory phenomenon and the perception of diversity. Building on these insights, we can apply the salient points of the psychoanalytic approach to the foreigner, precisely in terms of uncanny. If in cognitivism the external and extraneous stimulus to the reference categories of the subject produces anxiety, in a psychoanalytic perspective the uncanny implies a subjective sharing in the perception of anguish.