Uncanny most simply means the opposite of what is familiar. It is the nature of being simultaneously attracted to yet repulsed by an object. The uncanny menaces and entity in us that we embrace so deep within ourselves that we are unaware of its being until something provokes it to come into light. Even then, we cannot pinpoint what we were made to doubt. It is a secret that should never see the light of day. Sigmund Freud is to credit with the peculiar terror of the uncanny. Freud convinces us that there are things we must repress to function as ourselves, but which such repression is not synonymous with squandering to extinction. What is repressed must continue to operate in order for us to be able to be ourselves. The uncanny is remarkably unique to each of us—we repress things, secrets, that are most intimate and being brought face to face with them causes our own demise. ETA Hoffmann utilizes and overlaps Freud’s mechanisms of the uncanny, but focuses on castration to employ an overall theme of a secret coming into light, to cause down fall for reader and character.…show more content… As a child, his father was visited regularly late at night by Coppelius. When the man showed up, Nathaniel’s mother would send him off to bed heeding that the Sandman was coming-- a wicked monster who steals the eyes of children to feed to his young. Being too old to truly believe the tale, Nathaniel curiously became obsessed with the Sandman and was overwhelmed with the urge to know what his father and Coppelius doing on the late night visits, and why his parents became uneasy. He hid in the study where Coppelius found him, dragged him toward the fireplace, and threatened to burn out his eyes—but his father intervened and he was saved only to fall ill for the following