Urdiales 1

John E. Urdiales
ENG 320Critical Theory
Psychoanalysis Application FINAL
10 April 2015
The Uncanny in The Black Cat
Edgar Allan Poes short story, The Black Cat, tells us about the homely and the
unheimlich and the sociopathic tendency of a murderous man. The narrators description of the
tale begins with his purpose: to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without
comment, a series of mere household events. In their consequences, these events have terrified
have torturedhave destroyed me (Poe 71, emphasis added). This experience indicates that
something familiarin psychoanalytic terms, something repressedhas happened to the
narrator. This familiar feeling is what Sigmund Freud called the uncanny. In his essay by the
same name, he says that the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is
known of old and long familiar (Freud 255). One of the definitions he uses to describe the
uncanny reads: II. Concealed, kept from sight, so that others do not get to know of or about it,
withheld from others (Freud 257). And again: the uncanny is associated with that which is
eerie, weird, arousing gruesome fear and even ghostly (Freud 258). Already, he notes that
the uncanny is something improper or offensive, but also possessing a complicated and almost
impractical nature. It is clearly a challenge to pinpoint exactly what the uncanny is and is not, but
Freud opens the term up to a kind of multiplicity of meanings, thus enabling a variety of
perspectives. However, the role of the uncanny in The Black Cat is larger than even these
definitions; Freud would not restrict the literary uncanny to two or three simple observations.
Instead, Freud might suggest that The Black Cat is rife with uncanniness and the
psychoanalytic idea underpinning this concept. The uncanny is found in the text through such
methods of Freudian psychoanalysis: feminised transference, the doubling of Pluto, the second

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cat, and the wife, and the cats and the events surrounding the cats as reflections of the conscious
and unconscious levels of the human mind. Such events draw on the phallic nature of the
narrators violence and lead him to his sociopathic tendencies. On the motif of violence,
conclusions can be drawn on the critical nature of the childhood and the childs relationship to
the family. Through these means, the cats become the familiar, or the uncanny, and are doubled
to the narrator, who also suffers from an anxiety of castration originating in childhood.
The narrators past is filled with an understanding of being bullied, yet bereft of the
necessary filling of familial and human love. He tells the reader that from infancy he had been
known for his docility and humanity ofdisposition, in addition to a tenderness of heart
which resulted in the frequent quip of any of his friends (Poe 71). These traits are stereotypical
descriptions of a female or a feminised noun; however, he establishes that the bodily vision of
himself happened to be an emasculated self, one which had suffered a rejection of the male
biological selfa rejection of the heterosexual person into which he had already developed
despite a lack of interpersonal and emotional connection to his parentsand became manifest in
his inability to form relationships with others, predominantly people but later animals.
Furthermore, he associates the memory of happy times spent with caressing his animals with a
certain growth into manhood, continuing to derive from it one of [his] principal sources of
pleasure (Poe 71). The animals become the feminising tool of transference used to describe his
tender character and happy memories. Moreover, he establishes that he received explicit
gratification derived from his attachment to the animals, rather than any human connection to his
parents. Gerald Kennedy discusses the narrators melancholic tendency to react violently as a
means of self-inflicted punishment: Freud contrasts melancholia with ordinary mourning,
characterising the former as a profoundly painful dejection, a sense of deprivation so absolute

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that it entails a loss of self-esteem (Kennedy 543). Kennedy uses the connection of melancholy
to suggest not only the reason for the narrators perversity, but also for his need to hang Pluto
and then axe his wife. These are the internalised emotions of his dejected childhood. The reason
why he kills uncontrollably is to fix his emotion-deprived past. Kennedy also points out that
Poes narrators usually fit in the frame of one who offers implicit hostility toward cherished
women and an unlikely affection toward irritating males (Kennedy 544). The same is true
in The Black Cat: he loves his wife but irrationally kills her and loves an animal which
reminds him all too much of the memory of his childhood abandonment he desperately seeks to
forget. The narrators tender youth, which lacks familial love, later becomes repressed in
adulthood, and this in turn leads to his sociopathic violent nature.
To specify from these points: throughout this play of the memories of childhood, the
narrator identifies himself with two doubles: his wife and Pluto. Ed Piacentino claims that [t]he
psychodynamics of his wifes being one of the mirrors of [the narrators] lost selfmake the
marital relationship of the narrator and his wife seem intriguing in that they provide the clues
necessary to understanding his murderous tendencies (Piacentino 161). Their relationship lacks
intimacy and emotion because the narrator transfers that emotion to his animals. For this reason,
he identifies his significant other as Pluto, rather than his wife. In this way, the real double (the
cat) becomes doubled to his wife; they both simultaneously mirror the image of the narrator
because of his identifying himself with both, but in different ways; his wife and his pet,
respectively.
Piacentino uses the narrators motive to explain his perversity, but this can also account
for his descent into the unconscious of the mind. Piacentino claims that [t]he narrators motive
for murdering his wife seems to be subconscious and, therefore, the crime is not consciously

Urdiales 4
premeditated (Piacentino 153). But his problem is really more difficult than a mishandling of
childhood memories. If his actions were subconsciously performed, he would have had some
awareness of the connection between his bad childhood memories and his adulthood lack of
emotion. Using this information, it is easier to determine his actions as being unconsciously done
because he had no idea how to handle in adulthood his being excluded by his peers and parents
in childhood. Therefore, his perversity may be accounted as an unconscious recognition of this
basic human need for intimacy: he seeks it in adulthood first through sexual intimacy with his
wife and then through relationships with animals which had already been established in his
childhood.
Furthermore, the narrators wife acknowledges the superstition associated with black
cats: she made frequent allusion to the ancient popular notion, which regarded all black cats as
witches in disguise (Poe 71). Through this association, the cats in the story are introduced as
being a witchs familiar, or companionthat thing which is familiar, or uncanny. In his
introduction to The Uncanny, Richard J. Lane describes the uncanny as something
frightening relating to the familiar, possessing varying degrees of dread or horror, and being
that which ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light (Freud 254). The
narrator points out that his wife was never very serious, that he merely notices this because it
happens, just now, to be rememberedthis points to the deep underlying influence of his
unconscious fear of the black cat (Poe 71). Why the narrator brings this conflict into the light is a
question of speculation. Robert Shulman offers one suggestion:
Whereas the usual psychological study of Poe treats the fiction as an unconscious
manifestation of the authors problems or as an unconscious confirmation of
orthodox Freudian categories, it seems to me that in his best stories Poe has a

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genuine understanding of the unconscious processes and imaginative powers.
(Shulman 245)
Poe, like his narrator, knows the exact reason why the events of the story occur: he understands
his problems originate in childhood. The unconscious and apparently sudden remembering by
the narrator of the events which he recounts seems to have a motivation other than to give one
last speech before he meets the hangmans noose. While writing this story, Poes wife was dying
from consumption. To answer this emotional wound, he turned to alcohol to resolve his
problems. Unconsciously, he creates a story with multiple bloody encounters leading the narrator
not only to an actual death but also metaphorically to the gravehis own and the one he
fashioned in the wall of the basement for his axed-wife. In terms of Freudian classifications, the
narrators response to kill Pluto and then his wife are manifestations of the emotional neglect he
suffered in childhood and now again in his marriage: he struggles to identify with his father (as
male) and he never receives emotional support from either parent. As a result, the narrator is
unable to emotionally, physically, and spiritually connect to his wife. Instead, he turns to
animals, specifically the black cats. From this understanding of the uncanniness of the black cats,
the reader can appreciate the character of the uncanny in relation to the narrators unresolved
past and his relationship to the black cats.
The narrator is disposed to favour cats due to his childhood memories and his explicit
affection toward his various pets and catsa cat, to be precise (Poe 71). The first black cat
Plutohe houses during his marriage is a familiar beast for the narrator: it represents, to an
extent, some of his repressed childhood memories of being pampered with pets rather than the
necessary affection from his parents. Such parental affection shapes and forms the identity of the
child, but Poes narrator suffers from a psychosis because he clearly lacks this necessary human

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connection. In fact, Freud saw adult neuroses as deriving from early childhood traumas that
interfere with the childs psychic development (Parker 119). It would then make sense for the
narrator, if not consciously, to admit that he had formed a fondness for animals in which he was
never so happy as when feeding and caressing them (Poe 71). Freud referred to this as the
return of the repressed. He believed that repressed drives can pop back up in the form of
neurotic symptoms, disguised representations of unconscious desires because neurotics repeat
the same symptoms over and over (Parker 119). Because the narrators parents indulged the
narrator in domesticated companions, he never established a firm relationship with human peers.
Such indulgences led to a misrepresentation of the pleasure principle and the narrator associated
emotional joy with pets, rather than a human connection. For the narrator to establish pleasure as
a result of the unconditional love1 received from his animal-friends, he effectively disconnects
himself from proper human interaction, that which results in humanistic feelings and emotions.
His parents neglectfulness (likely unintentional) results in a manifestation of the narrators
sociopathic tendencies, regardless of the attachment he forms to animals.
Thus, Pluto, his new adulthood pet, comes to represent not only these repressed memories
and the emotional, humanistic lack from which he suffers, but also the repressed anxiety of
castration, transferred through the compulsive stabbing out of one of the cats eyes from the
socket (Poe 72). Freud identifies this association of the eyes to the fear of castration: he says,
anxiety about ones eyes, the fear of going blind, is often enough to substitute for the dread of
being castrated (Freud 261). He believes that the threat of being castratedexcites a peculiarly
violent and obscure emotion originating in the loss of an organ (Freud 262). Furthermore, this
horrible dread is primarily evident in children: We know from psychoanalytic experiencethat

1

This unconditional love is really based on the animals instinctual needs rather than the affection similar to that of
a husbands love for his wife.

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the fear of damaging or losing ones eyes is a terrible one in children (Freud 261). Having
already established that the narrators violence is the effect of an emotional-lack from his parents
in childhood, it is easy to now see the connection between the anxieties of castration of the
dominant male reproductive organ and the eyes. The narrator stabs-out Plutos eye not because
the cat is somehow deserving of such a fate; rather, the narrator cannot comprehend the
implications of his feelings of jealousy and empathetic love. Such emotions likely have had a
negative effect on his inability to successfully perform during sexual intercourse. To make up for
his weaknesshis sexual ability to knowhe takes away from Pluto the thing which enables
him to see and to know visually. The cats physical appearanceblack with a splotch of white
(Poe 73) upon its chestreminds the narrator of his sexual and emotional weaknesses. This
incapacity to feel emotion relates to his relationship with his parents versus the relationship he
has with animals. The animals, from the Freudian understanding of the mother, have no penis
the sex is not specified. Like the mother, he assumes the cats have been castrated. His fear of his
father castrating him is transferred and thus subsumed by both parents. As if in answer to these
feelings of guilt, he turns to alcohol and drowns in wine all memory of the deed he commits
against the cat (Poe 72). His aggression originates in his alcoholism and his inability to love his
wife and pets. Poe scholar Magdalen Wing-chi Ki suggests that the aggressive actions, and the
story itself, reflect the [narrators] love of (self) mutilation. Having desecrated his flesh with
alcohol, the narrator wants to leave a mark on the body of the other, and desecrates the cats
flesh (Wing-chi 576). His aggressive attitude thus paves the way for the stabbing-out of Plutos
eye and the murder of his wife. In many ways, this story follows similar patterns from Poes own
life. This textual illustration mirrors the battle with alcoholism that Poe faced during the death of
his wife. However likely, the narrator is left with the inability to communicate not only with his

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fellow man, but also with the animals to which he has established recognisable emotional
attachment.
Both cats and the narrators wife are doubled images of the narrator. In his discussion of
the uncanny, Freud also describes the double in such characters who are to be considered
identical because they look alike or possess similar traits, habits, tendencies, or identifications
(Freud 263). Pluto and the second black cat are seen as doubles of each other as well as of the
narrator. Because the narrator initially identifies with Pluto rather than his wife, his doubling is
made explicit: Pluto was [his] favourite pet and playmate. [He] alone fed him, and so on (Poe
71, emphasis added). Freud would label this relationship as one in which the subject identifies
himself with someone else, so that he is in doubt as to which his self is, or rather, with whom he
sexually and physically identifies (Freud 263). Because he spends so much time pouring over
Pluto, he rejects the inherent human connection he has with his wife. Thus, he identifies himself
with Pluto, his double. The second cat, however, offers additional speculation. It is described as
some black object sitting atop a hogshead which captures his attention (Poe 73). His initial
care for the beast is similar to his affection for Pluto; however, he quickly grows tired of the
things company. He notes that, [w]hat added, no doubt, to [his] hatred of the beast, was the
discoverythat, like Pluto, it also had been deprived of one of its eyes and his wife was
endeared by it for that reason (Poe 73). First, his irritation of the cats missing eye proves his
feelings of guilt and shame, despite not mentioning them. Secondly, his wife takes an interest in
the cat because she had that humanity of feeling which had once been [his] distinguishing trait
(Poe 74). She now has the redeeming quality which the narrator previously possessed; he claims
that she robbed him of his ability to love animals (and humans). Here, he aligns himself in
opposition to his wife for that redeeming quality of her humanity. Both the cat and his wife, then,

Urdiales 9
become doubled to the narrator as he undergoes a doubling, dividing and interchanging of the
self (Freud 263). No longer the person he once was, he is now able to attack the second cat and
kill his wife in the process, altogether bereft of any sense of remorse, shame, or guilt after
plunging the axe into her skull.
The replacement cat is highly symbolic. The new black catwhich remains nameless
not only replaces Pluto and so provides a similar purpose or reaction as the supply of pets
provided by his parents during his childhood, but also has a distinguishing splotch of white
upon its breast, the region covering the heart (Poe 73). The white could represent a variety of
things. After his home burns downthe symbolic manifestation of Poes life crumbling away as
he loses his wife to consumption and his job to his alcoholismthe bas relief upon the white
surface, the figure of a gigantic cat, (Poe 73) comes to represent the innocence of his youth and
of Pluto, the pureness of sentimental love, or the soon-to-be white-splotched replacement cat.
The images of white recall a sense of innocence found in childhoodthe narrators childhood.
But this is implied because the narrator is the one telling the graphic tale, cryptically begging for
his life before the gallows. Magdalen Wing-chi Ki is quick to point out that [w]ith only one eye
left and a rope-mark around its neck, [Pluto] represents evil and chaos in the eyes of the narrator
(Wing-chi 586). This recognition of evil becomes, for the narrator, a sufficient motive to kill
Pluto. The new, unnamed cat is also blacksymbolic of evilbut also of something hidden in
the conscious. And this cat, like Pluto, is missing an eye. He is the marked reminder of the
narrators egregious actions against Pluto. After he brings the animal home, he develops distaste
for and an aberrant dislike of the cat because it explicitly recalls a certain sense of shame
within the narrator (Poe 73). That shame is connected to the white spot upon the breast of the cat.
It shows the narrator the kind nature of the cat but also reminds him of his unjustifiable

Urdiales 10
misdemeanour against Pluto. For this reason, the new cat is also representative of the narrators
unconscious. This cat, ironically, is also without an eye, and reminds the narrator of the stronger
memory and repressed feelings of the neglect he suffered by his parents in childhood, but
received through the unconditional love of his supplemental pets (Poe 73). Then the beast
follows him and makes several attempts to climb upon him. These actions evoke the memory of
his murdering Pluto, and consequently fill him with an absolute dread of the nameless cat (Poe
74). This feeling of dreador rather fearis also within Freuds unconscious level of the human
mind. With the new cat, he delves deeper into the human person, into the human mind. As he
dives, his descent is rapid: he comes to understand that the white spot upon the cats breast is in a
recognisable shapeof a ghastly thingof the GALLOWS! (Poe 74)but symbolically
represents more. It signifies his vile actions against Pluto, his fear of facing the humiliation of his
childhood, and ultimately his fear of death. In this way, the cat becomes a symbol of itself.
Despite all of this, the reader comes to the realisation that the narrator has no closure and
that his psychological issues ultimately cannot be resolved in understanding the cats, his vicious
and senseless murder of his wife, or the fact that he suffers from an under-nurtured childhood.
He goes through an explicit explanation of the events which occur a priori his trial and
subsequent hanging at the gallows, but fails to recognise the critical components of his actions:
namely, humanistic feelings of regret, remorse, shame, or guilt. He lacks any capability of
emotion after aggressively slaying Pluto and this culminates in his lodging the axe into his wife,
forever silencing her. In this event where he cannot have what he desires, he buries the axe, his
wife, and the bane of his sociopathic efforts into the wall, sealing his fate in the screaming cat
hiding inside the wall.

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