Steve_Bamlett_blog

In Freud, the ‘unheimlich’ and the ‘heimlich’ are a kind of equivalence. Is what ‘feels like home’ really the ‘uncanny’?

Even if we do not invoke Freud, the doubt about the comfort conveyed by this prompt question is in the prompt question itself: ‘What’s a place you visited that felt like home?’ There are two many objects  in this question that are meant to be equivalences: ‘a place you visited’,  ‘a place … that felt like home’, and, of course, ‘home’. It’s a question that doubts the perceptions it invokes by insisting that these objects or spaces are not in any way the ‘same’ objects or spaces but are essentially different from each other, the key focus being not any object at all but a subjective ‘feeling’.

The phrase ‘feel like’ and the doubts it carries tbat to feel like is not to be the same, as in the version of it that Hamlet  in Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 2,so balks at, in the word ‘seems’:

QUEEN 
...
Do not forever with thy vailèd lids
Seek for thy noble father in the dust.
Thou know’st ’tis common; all that lives must die,
Passing through nature to eternity.
HAMLET 
Ay, madam, it is common.
QUEEN  If it be,
Why seems it so particular with thee?
HAMLET 
“Seems,” madam? Nay, it is. I know not “seems.”
’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected havior of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly. These indeed “seem,”
For they are actions that a man might play;
But I have that within which passes show,
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.

I know not ‘feels like’ either, he might have said! Hamlet is a binary radical however. If it is not the thing itself but only ‘seems’ to be it, or ‘feels like’ it, it is not the thing for him who must have existential truth. However, the point is that life is rarely so straightforward. Freud absorbed the idea of that which seems like home, heimlich, into that which is like home but estranged too from what we think home should be, so that unheimlich has tbe same burden as its supposed antonym, for they both signify likeness to ‘home’ and an additional feeling that is the negation of the primarily evoked feeling.

That negation is not necessarily of the likeness but of the feelings that we feel the term ‘home’ ought to arouse in us; a warm comfortable feel. The unheimlich is tinged with the horror that these comfortable feelings hide ones far less comfortable, even the stuff of fearful horror. But so, Freud insists, is the heimlich full of such ambivalence at the level of dreams and fantasies, for all of us know that to be in a place ‘like home’ that is not ‘home’ is as full of the potential of angst as pleasure, horror as delight. The equivalent in English is the word family, with its tie to the word family. We are perhaps as thrown by the familiar that feels somehow wrong as we are ansorbed into its warm embrace, that is oft ambivalent.

To visit a place that is heimlich is to be made feel comfortable in a place in which you must and ought to be wary of what seeming and likeness hides. That is the situation which Freud’s English translators called the uncanny. But the uncanny works as a word because it was once related to the word canny, and has the same relation of feeling odd in a space that claims to be comfortable as heimlich. In the North East of England, where the word still has play, it may at some levels of feeling in the word have the same ambivalence. [See https://www.etymonline.com/word/canny%5D.

In Gothic novels, homes that are uncanny are deliberately queered to show that the normal home in which you are invited to is not so normal after all. Thus Castle Dracula and thus, Wuthering Heights. But there is nothing more pleasing than a welcome embrace into a home-like-home, but that it threatens to consume you, so.etimes literally, in its kindness: a similitude that comforts you so that you can be taken into its jaws, paws or traps more easily.

In Freud’s thinking this is so not because these dangerous places look like truly safe ones but because ideologically home and family themselves present as safe places, where you feel safe, when they are actually full of hidden, secret and repressed danger. That ambivalence registers as a low-level anxiety behind feelings of safety. Thus the source of the effects of parental abuse, are so much greater than stranger abuse, but though not to be so in conventional thi king and feeling because such horrors are unthinkable in normative thought.

So, have I visited a place that feels like ‘home’ / heim? Like many questions, its solution is less comforting to the place I nominate than it or its owners might think or feel. That is because such a place demands a wariness from me that places of overt threat do not. So let me skip the no.inatipn tbis time!

That’s all for now

Love

Steven xxxxxxx