Freud’s The Uncanny and the Ghost in the Nursery

SadieHoagland

It’s hard to know where to begin. With Freud’s concept of the uncanny as that which makes you feel notat-home in your own home? As that which makes the familiar (a girl) into the unfamiliar (an automaton?), a ghost story (The Sandman) into a reality (a killer)? Or with Freud himself, who tells us the uncanny exists in our fear of being buried alive, which is actually rooted in a primary fantasy of the pleasure of being in the womb?

Or that night? Or that woman’s story? Each thread here its own hourglass knocked sideways, but somehow still raining sand.

That night. My son is ten months old and has another very high fever. His third in the past few weeks. The doctor will later diagnose him with poly febrile syndrome, but right now we’ve just returned from a second nighttime ER visit. He has been cleared of pneumonia; his heart rate had been 175 when we got there so they had given him a chest Xray. His tiny ribs pressed like a flower in the giant machine. I am in my teaching clothes, having taken him as soon as I got home and felt his hummingbird heart race as I nursed his hot little body. It was like holding a loaf of bread right from the oven. Now that he’s got a lower fever, I want him to sleep well, in his crib, but I won’t leave him alone. He’s too lethargic to cry out strongly if he needs me. I pull the mattress off our Ikea hideaway couch and put it on his floor.

I can’t sleep at all, listening for his breaths. And then suddenly, I am asleep.

Freud writes that “the uncanny effect is often and easily produced by effacing the distinction between imagination and reality, such as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality.”

It’s worth noting here that before I moved to Louisiana I didn’t believe in ghosts, not really. I had one strange experience living in an apartment where I felt like there was always someone in the room, someone who needed addressing. A nagging feeling. But then we moved into this house where my son was born, I heard walking up and down the hall. I would get up multiple times, thinking my daughter was sleep walking, to find the hall empty. My husband heard this, too.

Once, I felt a hand on my back as I slept. Again, I went to my daughter’s room thinking she’d somehow touched me and snuck back to her room, only to find her fast asleep. Another time, I heard someone say my name in the dark: Sadie. Clear as day. An adult woman’s voice. In this house, too, I dreamed my husband’s dead mother. I never met her but still, my description of her outfit was spot on my husband said.

And this was all before the second baby, my son. Before the breastfeeding while working full time, and before getting very little sleep. My labor with him began in the house in the middle of the night, with me throwing up violently. The initial separation of my body with my son’s body exquisitely painful, and always dangerous, as I bled excessively with both my children’s births. Horrifying and natural. Repulsive (the lumps of tissue, the placenta) and gorgeous (ten perfect tiny fingernails). The within, the without.

My body, according to Freud, instantly converted from my son’s Heimlich, his home, to his unheimlich, his uncanny. Freud writes of the female genitalia: “this unheimlich place, however, is entrance to the former heim (home) of all human beings, to the place where everyone dwelt once upon a time and in the beginning.”

When my daughter was born, my first natural childbirth, I made a sound I did not know I could make. I was on all fours on the labor room floor and was nearing the end of the labor. It wasn’t a scream or a yell—somewhere in between the two—and it came from deep within. It took me a moment after I heard it to realize that I had made this cry. I was no longer myself, but of my body. I closed my eyes then, and surrendered any sense of what old Freud would have called an ego. As the bones of my pelvis pulled apart, I felt as if I was in some dark place within my body. Or without. In that same liminal place, perhaps, that my infant was in those last moments before her birth.

Language brought me back to this world with a simple phrase, the kind of two words you can string together at that stage in childbirth: Becoming animal. Minutes later, my daughter was born, and I’d never felt more human than when she squinted her tiny eyes up at me, her head the size of a grapefruit damp with black hair.

Even in the second labor, being this doorway is mysterious. It’s easier and significantly faster but there’s still a slipping away. A deep internal moment before he comes when I feel as if I am both vessel and passenger, both container and water. A fluidity as I become this threshold between his pre-life and his life. It’s not something to understand, and it’s not something we talk about when we talk about motherhood—mother as border.

These months after birth, I wonder when I stop being a border. When he will be his own, but also when he will be securely in this world, and mine rather than of me.

During this time of his fever, my son lies in his crib sometimes, laughing. We watch on the baby monitor as he looks at one spot in the room, a spot where we see nothing and he is smiling, listening, laughing. Who is talking to him, we wonder? We decide it’s okay, since he’s laughing. Is he somehow part of that other world still? (There are many cultures who believe that prelingual babies can still see and hear and talk to spirits). Am I? Are all new mothers? Is that why the ghosts?

I read the woman’s story when I’m desperately scrolling through a FB group I’ve joined, a group for the valiant cause of getting newborns to sleep. Moms post photos of babies sleeping with captions like “Success! Slept her first night through!” or “Don’t be deceived: This sweet thing kept me up all night.” Everyone posting is tired, some desperate, some there because they’ve come through the worst of it and have ideas to offer. People spout kindness and support and reminders that teenagers sleep through the night, so it won’t last forever. Women, it’s all women, expressing their fears, confessing to co-sleeping, asking questions about how bad pacifiers are really. We all basically want to know if we are failing parenting, or if we just feel like we are failing parenting.

The post shows up in my feed not long before Halloween. The woman writes this story to the group: After her son is born, she is rocking him in a chair and feels a hand on her shoulder. No one is there. Shortly after, she lays her infant on a bean bag while she turns to change her toddler daughter’s diaper. She hears a noise, turns around, and sees a pillow covering his face. A pillow that had been on the floor. She quickly moves it and gathers her children in her arms and tells the spirit to leave. Her nose starts gushing blood. She calls her husband, and together they call a priest who comes over the next day.

The real horror of the story, of course, is that if it wasn’t a ghost then she somehow covered her child’s face with a pillow without being conscious of it. The horror, the threat, is coming from inside the house. The blood gushes from her nose. Her body then is haunted: she is perhaps still this liminal space, the gateway for which the unfamiliar to enter the familiar.

Back to that fevered night. I somehow fall asleep. I dream that I notice a hole in the ceiling in the corner of his room, a ragged woody wound that leads to the attic. I get up on the nursery chair and climb into it, and there I find a ghost. Not just a ghost, but the ur-ghost. A screaming blackness--it’s death personified and it’s coming for my son. I decide to leap for it, across the wood rafters of the attic. I want to strangle it.

As I leap, I am suddenly awoken by a fierce and painful pinch on my left shin. I wake up sweating, terrified. I understand that whatever presence is in the room has awoken me as some act of grace, but I am now too scared to sleep. I drag my body across the floor, I rub my shin, the pain still there, I reach my hand through the bars of my son’s crib and feel for his breath. The room is pitch black and I am utterly sure that there is someone in the room with us.

I don’t think this is an essay, by the way, about postpartum psychosis. The other symptoms, like a lasting break from reality, were not there for me or, seemingly, my Facebook friend. Certainly, lack of sleep and stress explains some, if not all, of this. And that’s fine, I’m not opposed to the logical explanation. But even in within that logic, this is interesting phenomena.

The horror that is both internal, a dream of death, and external, a clear and horrifying pinch. It is both real— my son’s acute illness, his fragility in that moment—and surreal, a ghost in the room. For my Facebook friend, the logical explanation is actually more horrifying than the paranormal explanation. The reactions to her post are things like, “get some sage,” (followed by a reminder of cultural appropriation and the devasting environmental impact on desert white sage of white people suddenly getting into sage), two replies calling her to move, two to actually burn down her house. Some gentle suggestions that sleep deprivation causes hallucinations and one counter-story from a woman to casually demonstrate it. She tells of a midnight trip to change her child’s diaper; she’s so tired she can barely walk straight.

She picks her child up and accidentally catches his leg slightly on the changing table. She believes she has ripped his leg off. She puts him down to start looking for his severed leg on the floor.

When light finally crept into that night, I looked for a mark on my own leg. In the blue dawn light, I thought perhaps a bug had bitten me. I wanted a bug bite to be there. But there was none, though it still felt sore. My son’s fever broke with the morning, and I briefly thought about moving him out of the room. For weeks, I stared at the ceiling I had crawled through, checking it for any sign of structural weakness.

I never told this story on social media, or anywhere before now. In some ways, the uncanny of postpartum is a space that defies language, or any kind of analysis. Part of this has to do with priorities, I mean who gives an eff about Freud when your nipples are raw and you haven’t slept more than two hours straight in six weeks (not exaggerating here). And part of this has to do with a historical disregard for women’s stories, a disgust of women’s bodies, a belief that women can’t tell the truth, really, and an idea that there is something so domestic and boring about it all and keep it in your journal, will you? (Sure, right after I pick up this severed baby leg. Boring?!)

But also, to talk about all this otherness is to remember the power that is revealed in childbirth. Bringing another human into this world is a power that frightens, and always has (no need to review the history of the patriarchy here). Having a child, and holding this child, you can’t help but feel outside of yourself. I made this thing? I am that which separates life from death? I remember looking at the umbilical cord as they cut it. It was so disgusting, purply, and wet, like a dead thing snaking out of me. And yet it was amazing. This is how this baby grew? This thing now nestling into my chest and making little grunting noises is my child? This thing who will survive his infant illnesses and a global pandemic and in just a few short years grow into a child who will eat waffles and say things like “Ahh, man…”.

There’s some part of this that is just too strange, too magical for words.

But another reason, perhaps the real reason, I didn’t post my ghost story is because I feel I am constantly balancing a performance between being a mother and an academic and at this moment in my life—when my second child was ten months old—the two felt like violently opposing forces in my life. Being exhausted but expected to remember important scholarship, to sound smart, to perform intellectualism even as my body leeched nutrients my brain needed to my baby. Even as my primary desire was to hold him, be with him, to gap in wonder at him rather than do anything else.

To be able to think about these events in relation to an essay I often teach, then, is a reconciliation of these two parts of my life. The unheimlich, the unspeakable, the liminal, the sheer wonder of childbirth, articulated. It is an attempt to render what is uncanny, legible.

You see, my body was and now my house is haunted with children, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I am at home in this haunting. And as for the ghost in the house, the one that pinches you awake from a nightmare, that makes you check your son’s breathing, that walks the halls at midnight. We can live with that.