Childhood, severed heads, and the uncanny: Freudian precursors

Abstract

Freud’s theories of the uncanny are generally treated ahistorically as an originary text. This essay places his work in the context of nineteenth-century English theories of childhood development (particularly the work of James Sully), the uncanny, and the unconscious. Drawing on literary texts from Robert Southey, Charles Kingsley, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Frances Power Cobbe, and the art of John William Waterhouse, it explores how the ancient oracular figure of the teraph, interpreted, rather macabrely, as the severed head of a child, became an embodiment of both the workings of the unconscious mind and the uncanny in nineteenth-century culture, and the locus of cultural and social anxieties projected onto the figure of the child.