The references, especially the literary ones, present in Freud’s text “Das Unheimliche” (“The Uncanny”) (1919/1997) are revised to discuss to what extent they account for the formation of this concept. The works by Hoffmann, Schnitzler, Schiller, Heine, Goethe, Schaeffer, Ovid, Twain, Dante, Shakespeare, Anderson, Herodotus, Wilde, Schelling, Jentsch, Kammerer and Selligmann are discussed. A trend in using literature in analytic research is found in “Das Unheimliche”, resulting in an extended approach to aesthetics. An excursion into etymology reveals the untranslatable nature of this concept and its proper psychic dynamism, which unfolds between the already-known and the unrecognized. Three correlated and inseparable dimensions - the psychic one, the cultural one and the heuristic one - compose that feeling, each of which refers to a sense of the devilish in Freud.
Key words:
Das Unheimliche; psychoanalysis; literature; etymology