The Pictorial Uncanny

This essay seeks to reopen the space of interpretation between psychoanalysis and the current studies of image, media, and machine. W. J. T. Mitchell’s important work on animated picture in the book What Do Pictures Want? puts a fresh demand on theorists to contemplate the pictorial uncanny. It also means that Freud’s speculations about the uncanny and his rejection of Ernst Jentsch’s stance on the same must be re‐evaluated with respect to the place of automata in psychoanalytical studies. Mitchell has been critical of some of the central Freudian assumptions about the human psyche and, in particular, how images and texts address our visual and cognitive perception. At the same time, Mitchell often alludes to the uncanny and related psychoanalytical concepts and seems to find them indispensable to his analysis of animated picture. Are such ambivalences indicative of the fundamental difficulty of doing without Freudian insights? This essay probes Mitchell’s relationship with psychoanalysis by making a double interpretative move surrounding Freud’s classic essay ‘Das “Unheimliche”’. It begins with the following questions: in what sense can the Freudian uncanny be said to frame Mitchell’s engagement with the psychic powers of image, object, and media? Will Mitchell’s work on media and animated picture help reveal some aspects of Freud’s original insights that would have escaped our attention? The essay concludes by reflecting on the current developments in biocybernetics and neuroscientific experiments to explain why the pictorial uncanny must be thought in our time.