Let’s be real here, clowns are terrifying. If you think otherwise I dare you to watch one episode of American Horror Story season four where Twisty the clown kidnaps people and locks them up in his cage without cowering behind a cushion and having freaked out nightmares. Go on, dare you.
This summer creepy clown sightings began popping up all over American, and now they’ve made their merry way to the UK too. With sightings in Newcastle and the north of England, even if this is some kind of sick prank, people are freaked out. But just why are we so scared of clowns? Neuroscience and a Freudian theory have the answer.
According to Quartz, the fear can be traced back to Sigmund Freud’s ‘The Uncanny’ theory. The theory explains that the world ‘uncanny’ is very similar to the word ‘familiarity.’ They use the example of the German word for uncanny, ‘unheimlich,’ which is the opposite of ‘heimlich,’ which means ‘familiar’ or ‘belonging to the home.’ Are you still with me? So our uncanny and familiar feelings are similar, but in some way distored...right, this is getting slightly confusing.
An assistant professor of psychiatry at Havard Medical School decided to debunk the fear, and discovered that Freud’s uncanny is almost something familiarly recognisable, but it’s somehow a little bit off. So it’s something we are able to recognise, e.g. a clown from a childhood party that isn’t scary, but there’s something not quite right about it. Clowns faces are not dissimilar to our own faces, but they have been slightly distorted or exaggerated with face paints.
That isn’t all though, Psychiatrist, Chris Heath believes that the ‘familiar element of clowns isn’t something we’re used to, it’s a repressed childhood feeling. He adds: ‘things are creepy when they invoke memories of a time when we believed this thing to be true, for instance, magic of the undead.’
I can totally get on board with this – we picture clowns from a time when witches, fairies and other magical things were real to us, but now they’ve been distorted in our minds by TV (thanks American Horror Story) and made disturbing. So is it that when we watch these shows or see creepy images of clowns in our cities we believe them to be real? According to Freud it is, so if anyone teases you about your clown fear – either make them watch Twisty the clown, or show them this.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.