Women in love: Carnal and spiritual transgressions in late medieval France

The interplay between structure and antistructure invariably gives rise to a shadow world simultaneously fostered by, and festering within, this generating matrix. This world is confected from detritus that was shed en route to the establishment of new forms. Thus while individuals are, from a certain perspective, in training to inhabit the new structures that society has ordained for them, many of the shadow world's characteristic features reach out to them as strangely familiar, filling them with nostalgia for a past they cannot quite remember. Sigmund Freud sees this kind of potentiality in the generation of the uncanny double, which he describes as a repository for "all the unfulfilled but possible futures to which we still like to cling in phantasy, all the strivings of the ego which adverse external circumstances have crushed, and all our suppressed acts of volition which nourish in us the illusion of free will."¹ And, as Freud is at pains to remind us, the category of the uncanny (in German unheimlich-literally the "unhomely" or "unfamiliar") is a species of the heimlich-the "homely" or the "familiar." In other words, the German language simultaneously entertains two entirely opposite definitions of heimlich-one betokening homely comfort; the other signifying varying shades of concealed or supernatural malice.² Similarly, the English word for "canny" has the same bifurcated capacity, accommodating occult and supernatural meanings that would normally be regarded as the preserve of the "uncanny. "³ In short, the uncanny or unfamiliar is what we choose to exile, suggesting that at some distant time it was intensely familiar.We recognize it as alien and menacing only when it attempts to come home.