Dr. Rob McMinn (the UK teacher behind the We Study Media edublog) offers up a nice Powerpoint “slideshare” from his courses, which gives a succinct overview of Freud’s work on the uncanny (das Unheimliche) in relation to horror texts and the media.
I particularly liked this slide below (#10), because it serves up the way that oppositional binaries structure the theory, especially in terms of the role of “secrets” in the private and the public (un-private?) spheres.
Binaries of the Uncanny
[...] At least a dozen of us raised our hands to comment about our own experiences of uncanny experiences in working with patients with psychosis. Indeed a beginning clinician should be prepared to be known in surprising ways… While I don’t have the wherewithal currently to enter into a discussion about how psychosis and the uncanny might be related (but I would love to do that later!), I did find this really cool slideshow on Freud’s Sense of the Uncanny Dr. Rob McMinn here. [...]