Whether we buy his theory or not, something must occur in our gray matter to make us squirm about the unknown.īut still, science strives to vanquish our fears – or at least, the unknown - for good. Freud asserted that fear of the unknown stems from the uncanny, the return of the repressed, i.e., the creepy is really the familiar. In earlier times, the unknown was so terrifying that we credited the devil for all the work, until science stole power from religion. Lovecraft wrote that our most intense fear is that of the unknown, and almost a century of technological progress hasn’t weakened his claim. Fear – we can describe it only when we don’t feel it.
