Uncanny Foreign Objects (Unheimliche Fremde Objekte): Lacan’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind

By: Jerry Aline Flieger

Abstract: In a talk delivered in 2016, (“Why do We Laugh at UFO’s?”), I referenced Freud’s theory about the social function of jokes to speculate on why the mention of UFO’s is almost always met with laughter (34th International Psyart Conference, Reims, France; published as “Objets trouvés: L’autre qui hante la psychanalyse,” Gradiva 17:2).