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title: 'Essentials Lab: A Disk Prompt!'
tags: [essentialsLab]

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tags: essentialsLab
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# Essentials Lab: A Disk Prompt!

## Disks of Varying Size

**Using a rectangular card and then two disks, jot down thoughts or loose summaries of the ideas presented in the following paragraphs. As you move from the card to the large disc to the small disc, work to hone in on the core claim, concept, definition at stake. The hope is that this exercise will both 1) help us to understand the components and structure of the arguments being made and 2) develop our skills of focusing on what is most essential.**

#### MYSTERIES! ![](https://i.imgur.com/hnXfIkR.png)

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**From Freud’s “The Uncanny”:**

The subject of the “uncanny” is a province of this kind. It undoubtedly belongs to all that is terrible—to all that arouses dread and creeping horror; it is equally certain, too, that the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with whatever excites dread. Yet we may expect that it implies some intrinsic quality which justifies the use of a special name. One is curious to know what this peculiar quality is which allows us to distinguish as “uncanny” certain things within the boundaries of what is “fearful.”

… the “uncanny” is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar. How this is possible, in what circumstances the familiar can become uncanny and frightening, I shall show in what follows. Let me also add that my investigation was actually begun by collecting a number of individual cases, and only later received confirmation after I had examined what language could tell us. In this discussion, however, I shall follow the opposite course. 

The German word unheimlich is obviously the opposite of heimlich, heimisch, meaning “familiar,” “native,” “belonging to the home”; and we are tempted to conclude that what is “uncanny” is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar. Naturally not everything which is new and unfamiliar is frightening, however; the relation cannot be inverted. We can only say that what is novel can easily become frightening and uncanny; some new things are frightening but not by any means all. Something has to be added to what is novel and unfamiliar to make it uncanny…

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**Complete Text:** https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/freud1.pdf

![](https://i.imgur.com/ACJvBLa.png)

(Kevin)