r especially--when K tries to make sense of things. The psychological toll is enormous.
Freud refers to a definition of the uncanny, now as something relative to demons and the forbidden, and now "as something which ought have been kept concealed but which has nevertheless come to light" (Freud 390). Freud holds that the ego, or conscious mind, experiences what is uncanny as a threat to itself, inasmuch as it involuntarily calls up pathological, compulsive associations and impulses that have been repressed. The experience of the uncanny, in Freud's view, is an experience of psychological anxiety "powerful enough to overrule the pleasure-principle, lending to certain aspects of the mind their daemonic character, and . . . a principle, too, which is responsible for a part of the course taken by the analyses of neurotic patients" (Freud 391). Hence feelings of powerlessness in a universe that seems governed by forces almost supernaturally beyond human control. This is exactly the situation in which K finds himself. It is useful to note that for Freud, the sens
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