Now, it may just be my penis envy, but...

...throughout the piece, I tended to lean more towards Jentsch and his hypotheses on the uncanny, than Freud's. All his talk of castration aside, a major point of contention I had with Freud's theory is on page 139 where Freud states, "The notion of intellectual uncertainty in no way helps us to understand this uncanny effect." This of course follows Jentsch's point that the uncanniness behind The Sand-Man is that the reader is unsure of Olimpia's being a doll or human. While I do agree that Jentsch's summary is inadequate for the story, I do believe that the inability to distinguish between reality and delusion is the primary sense of the uncanny for the story. (Freud makes note of various Shakespeare plays, stating that ghosts and faeries are simply a part of the universe. True--and this is what makes them "heimlich." By not stating whether or not the Sand-Man is simply a part of the universe, it leaves the text open to interpretation, allowing for the uncanny to be possible.) Nathaniel's mental seclusion caused by the fear of the Sand-Man causes him to lose his ability for close human relationships---or is there really a Sand-Man slowly destroying Nathaniel's life?

That being said, the introductory definitions of the various ways to interpret "heimlich" and "unheimlich" was INCREDIBLY interesting. I like that at some point, the uncanny becomes normal. That normalcy is exactly the thing that can become uncanny, if looked at with a certain lens.