Adjective

(en-adj)

Causing horror; terrible; shocking.

*

*:Such a scandal as the prosecution of a brother for forgery—with a verdict of guilty—is a most truly horrible , deplorable, fatal thing. It takes the respectability out of a family perhaps at a critical moment, when the family is just assuming the robes of respectability:it is a black spot which all the soaps ever advertised could never wash off.

*, comment=The New Yorker, March 19

, passage=Strangers fainted dead away at the sight of the Laughing Man's horrible face. Acquaintances shunned him.}}

*, author=(Ray Bradbury)

, passage=Some of us have had plastic surgery on our faces and fingerprints. Right now we have a horrible job; we're waiting for the war to begin and, as quickly, end.}}

Tremendously wrong or errant.

*{{quote-book, year=1933, title=(My Life and Hard Times), author=(James Thurber)

, passage=Her own mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house.}}

Adjective

(er)

strange, and mysteriously unsettling (as if supernatural); weird

He bore an uncanny resemblance to the dead sailor.

Careless.

(rfc-sense) (psychology, psychoanalysis, Freud) Simultaneously familiar and foreign, often uncomfortably so; translation of Freud's usage of the German "unheimlich" (literally "unsecret").

* 2011 , Espen Dahl, Hans-Gunter Heimbrock, In Between: The Holy Beyond Modern Dichotomies , page 99:

[The uncanny is] something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed. The link with repression now illuminates Schelling?s definition of the uncanny as ‘something that should have remained hidden and has come into the open.’ (Freud: 2003, 147 f)

* 2003 , Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny , page 1 [http://books.google.com/books?id=XkvSWxjrMN8C&printsec=frontcover&dq=uncanny+freud&hl=en&sa=X&ei=0uSCUu_5JuqW2AXOkIGIBg&ved=0CD0Q6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=uncanny&f=false]:

The uncanny involves feelings of uncertainty, in particular regarding the reality of who one is and what is being experienced.

* 2011 , Anneleen Masschelein, The Unconcept: The Freudian Uncanny in Late-Twentieth-Century Theory , page 2 [http://books.google.com/books?id=9XgohiN3vOwC&printsec=frontcover&dq=uncanny+freud&hl=en&sa=X&ei=0uSCUu_5JuqW2AXOkIGIBg&ved=0CEIQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=uncanny%20freud&f=false]:

Because the uncanny affects and haunts everything, it is in constant transformation and cannot be pinned down.

* 2001 , Diane Jonte-Pace, Speaking the Unspeakable , page 81 [http://books.google.com/books?id=GrtZ4fBOlTIC&printsec=frontcover&dq=uncanny+freud&hl=en&sa=X&ei=0uSCUu_5JuqW2AXOkIGIBg&ved=0CEgQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=uncanny&f=false]:

In the preceding chapter, we saw that Freud linked the maternal body, death, and the afterlife with the uncanny' in his famous essay "The ' Uncanny " ("Das Unheimliche").

* 1982 , Samuel Weber, The Legend of Freud , page 20 [http://books.google.com/books?id=mRwvpP1SiWEC&printsec=frontcover&dq=uncanny+freud&hl=en&sa=X&ei=0uSCUu_5JuqW2AXOkIGIBg&ved=0CE4Q6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=uncanny&f=false]:

This uncontrollable possibility—the possibility of a certain loss of control—can, perhaps, explain why the uncanny remains a marginal notion even within psychoanalysis itself.

* 2005 , Barbara Creed, Phallic Panic , page vii [http://books.google.com/books?id=3JrY_Pc4CFsC&printsec=frontcover&dq=uncanny+freud&hl=en&sa=X&ei=d-iCUrfWB4fu2AWAz4HoBA&ved=0CDUQ6AEwATgK#v=onepage&q=uncanny%20freud&f=false]:

Freud argued that the uncanny' was particularly associated with feelings of horror aroused by the figure of the paternal castrator, neglecting the tropes of woman and animal as a source of the ' uncanny .

* 1994 , Sonu Shamdasani and Michael Münchow, Speculations after Freud , page 186 [http://books.google.com/books?id=e_P9tt2YF3oC&printsec=frontcover&dq=uncanny+freud&hl=en&sa=X&ei=aumCUoSzEITj2QX1roHYBA&ved=0CEkQ6AEwBTgo#v=onepage&q=uncanny&f=false]:

As is well known, Freud introduced the concept of the uncanny into psychoanalysis in 1919 and used The Sandman as a prime illustration for his definition.