Part III. Uncanny Spaces and the Trauma of the Misplaced: Revisiting Psychological Athetosis as the EcoGothic

After climbing mount “Ktaadn” [Katahdin] in Maine, Thoreau observed that not all of nature was a one size-fits-all walk in the friendly woods with foxes cavorting and butterflies a-fluttering. While revisiting ecogothic perspectives (Conesa, 2024), a topical turn is made toward understanding interconnected fear responses to uncanny landscapes as a factor of previous and new traumatic events. A deep historical and comprehensive appraisal of organisms in their natural and newly found umwelten suggests that the ecogothic uncanny is a common experience of organism-territory accommodations to “place.” During these place-mind interstices, past traumatic events are amplified into newly terrifying forms: an unendurable gneiss. * Sigmund Freud argued (1919) that the uncanny was an intrusion of the dreadful into the familiar and thus it signals a radical departure from known ground. The American western expansion that brought settlers, colonizers, and business folks across plains and mountains saw the arrival of Eastern domiciled families and European immigrants who, in their wildest dreams, were not prepared for the rigors of trail life and prairie expanses—for the wild actual.