For definitions of unheimlich translated into English as uncanny, see Freud, Das Unheimliche (1919), paraphrased by Anthony Vidler in The Architectural Uncanny, stressing the etymology of Heim / home.
Freud wanted to demonstrate at the outset, on the basis of a semantic study of the German adjective heimlich and its antonym unheimlich that a negative meaning close to that of the antonym is already tied to the postive term heimlich, "friendlily comfortable," which would also signify "concealed, kept from sight," "deceitful and malicious," "behind someone's back." Thus, in the very word heimlich, the familiar and intimate are reversed into their opposites. The immanence of the strange within the familiar is considered as an etymological proof of the psychoanalytic hypothesis according to which "the uncanny is that class of the frightening, which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar."
For Freud, the uncanny (Unheimliche ) is thus the estranged familiar (Heimliche ) "For this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-- established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression." (According to Gorgio Agamben, what has been repressed is emblematic form.) As Kristeva puts it, "The Other is My (own and proper) Unconscious. (Strangers to Ourselves, p. 183)
Vidler describes the womb-house, what Tzara called "intra-uterine" architecture, as the very center of the uncanny. As Freud noted, "It often happens that neurotic men declare that they feel there is something uncanny about the female genital organs. This unheimlich place, however, is the entrance to the former Heim of all human beings, to the place where each of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning." (p.245) (cf. Kiesler and the nanny)
Marcel Duchamp, "Mariée" Death and its ambiguous incarnations in apparations and ghosts is another site of the uncanny. For "Our unconscious has as little use as it ever had for the idea of its own mortality."
Uncanniness has been interpreted as hereditary" instinct fear." For Kurt Goldheim, the uncanny is a shock to the total organism in its inability to react adequately to a situation. It is a primal experience that something does not "fit" into the total situation. For Freud, it is an "over-accentuation of psychical reality in comparison with material reality."
For Deleuze and Guattari, "nature is like art, because it always combines these two living elements in every way: House and Universe, Heimlich and Unheimlich, territory and deterritorialization, finite melodic compounds and the great infinite plane of composition, the small and large refrain." (What is Philosophy?, p. 186)
"Art begins not with flesh but with the house. That is why architecture is the first of the arts.(...)It can be defined by the " frame." by an interlocking of differently oriented frames, which will be imposed on the other arts, from painting to the cinema. (...) But however extendable this system may be, it still needs a vast plane of composition that carries out a kind of deframing following lines of flight that pass through the territory only in order to open it onto the universe." (ibid). "Without a set of impossibilities, you won't have the line of flight, the exit that is creation." ("Mediators," in Negotiations, p. 133)