Freud is travelling alone on a train. The door to his compartment is thrown open and an aged man enters. It is a mistake. A stranger on the train, the man is an intruder. Freud leaps up to correct the old man and to send him where he belongs, elsewhere. But then he sees that the old man is not a stranger at all: he is looking at his own reflection in the mirror. Freud dislikes the experience and expresses his discomfort, citing it as an uncanny incident in which his ‘double’ draws him away from himself.

It is not surprising that Freud has this uncanny experience while travelling. Travel is always, in a sense, an encounter with displacement. And on this train, Freud finds himself displaced from the homely site of identificatory stability and certainty; he is not himself, he is strange, a stranger to himself. Indeed, the arrival of the person from elsewhere, from the world outside the self, is the act of facing the foreigner, even if the foreigner turns out to be him. And in this moment of doubling, Freud is simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar – he is both inside and outside, singular and estranged. By recognizing his alien figure in the mirror, he is forced, if only for a minute, to see the self as other, as stranger.

This example, we suggest, underlines the significance of Freud's figure of the uncanny for understanding contemporary travel and haunting. For just as travel (and its writing) can inscribe divisions separating self and other, familiar and unfamiliar, it is also capable of doing the opposite: it can blur attempts to maintain the coherent identificatory categories of the traveller.