"With Freud indeed, foreignness, an uncanny one, creeps into the tranquility of reason itself...Henceforth, we know that we are foreigners to ourselves, and it is with the help of that sole support that we can attempt to live with others." (Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, p. 170)

In an article published in 1906, the German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch published "Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen ", an essay on the uncanny as an affective excitement -- a sensation of unease, of disorientation, of not being quite "at home" -- which a "fortunate formation" of the German language conveys quite clearly, since Heim specifically refers to the home. Thus, for Jentsch the experience of the new, the foreign, and the unusual can provoke mistrust, unease, and even hostility, as opposed to the familiar forms of the traditional, the usual, the hereditary which are a source of comfort and reassurance. While the familiar may even appear self-evident, the unfamiliar can create uncertainty and disorientation, and threats to the everyday sense of intellectual mastery. While the intensity of feeling associated with this disorientation can vary considerably, the sense of the uncanny is most particularly aroused in conditions of "doubt as to whether an apparently living being really is animate and, conversely doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate." (The point is taken up by Freud in Das Unheimliche ) Fear, terror, and horror can result. The impression of the uncanny is often provoked by wax figures, automata, panopticons, and panoramas, and in recent years the "uncanny valley" has been proposed to explain the unease that lifelike robots can provoke -- almost but not quite animate.