Freud, following Schiller, writes that the uncanny arises when something that should have remained concealed is unconcealed— that is, when what we believe we understand about the world (the familiar) suddenly becomes unfamiliar and unsettling. These are the moments when the ordinary becomes extraordinary.

Freud observes that uncanny feelings emerge most strongly when we see madness in others because we sense that these forces also operate within us, hidden in the shadowy, often unacknowledged parts of what he calls our “normal personalities.” For psychoanalysis, there is something inherently disorienting and destabilizing about the other.

Freud also remarks elsewhere: “It would not surprise me to hear that psychoanalysis, which seeks to uncover these secret forces, has come to seem uncanny to many people.” His assertion that psychoanalysis might be seen as uncanny relates to its ability to transform the familiar into the unfamiliar through the irruption of the unconscious—that which makes us strangers to ourselves, to use Kristeva’s phrase. By investigating the “madness” of others (and, by extension, our own “madness”), psychoanalysis exposes the strangeness of its own method. This method, influenced by the unconscious, becomes unfamiliar through its very application.

Take Freud’s Dora, subtitled “Fragment of a Case of Hysteria.” As Patrick Mahony notes, Freud’s language is filled with admissions of fragmentation: “The treatment was broken off,”“The case history is incomplete,” or “Reconstruction of the case comes as a supplement.” Mahony further observes that Freud seems helpless in creating a coherent narrative. Freud argues that fragmentation in speech is a diagnostic criterion for hysteria— speech marked by gaps, amnesias, and non-linear narratives.

Uncannily, Freud enacts the very speech of the hysteric he seeks to cure, producing a kind of “double” of his own analytic discourse. He claims the hysteric is invaded by an “uncanny disorder” that generates thoughts and impulses experienced as “alien guests,” seemingly “like those of a stranger.” In a similar fashion, psychoanalytic discourse itself is haunted—marked by gaps and discontinuities. In attempting to cure the hysteric, perhaps the first other of psychoanalysis, Freud’s discourse becomes infected by the very disorder it seeks to host and cure.

In being a Science of Madness, psychoanalysis becomes a Mad Science.

But in the opposite direction, let’s not forget Karl Kraus’s famous injunction: “Psychoanalysis is the disease for which it purports to be the cure.” I interpret this as saying that psychoanalysis, in a sense, turns the patient into a psychoanalytic patient. More clearly put: psychoanalytic treatment, let us say, infects the patient’s consciousness with the very unconscious productions it seeks to interpret with the hope of creating a cure. In this way, the infection flows both ways— from patient to analyst and from analyst to patient— in a parasitic or symbiotic relationship.

Psychoanalysis is a host to the other, and the other is a host to psychoanalysis:

a) Host: One who provides hospitality.

b) Host: An organism that harbors another organism, providing it with nourishment and shelter— often in a parasitic relationship, but sometimes in a mutualistic or commensal symbiotic relationship.

Derrida notes that a host offers both refuge and risk. By inviting the other in—be it the analyst, the unconscious, or the psychoanalytic process in general—the patient opens themselves up to the possibility of transformation but also to a kind of haunting: the haunting of a failed resolution. The psychoanalytic method, for its part, invites the patient's madness into its hospitable home as a haunted guest, offering it a room in the structure of meaning.

April 5th, 2025