The person not “hardened and proof against the lure of superstition” was Freud himself in the face of repeated appearances of the number 62 during his travels in Greece in 1909, when he was obsessed by the idea that he would die at the age of sixty-two. And, as he was writing those lines in his essay “Das Unheimliche” (“The Uncanny”), without mentioning that they referred directly to him, he was only a few months past his sixty-second birthday. Immediately after setting out these two examples, Freud introduces for the first time (and referring already to Jenseits des Lustprinzips [Beyond the Pleasure Principle], which would soon be published) a detailed account of repetition-compulsion, the last and supreme divinity in his mythology: “It must be explained that we are able to postulate the principle of a repetition-compulsion in the unconscious mind, based upon instinctual activity and probably inherent in the very nature of the instincts—a principle powerful enough to overrule the pleasure-principle, lending to certain aspects of the mind their daemonic character, and still very clearly expressed in the tendencies of small children; a principle, too, which is responsible for a part of the course taken by the analyses of neurotic patients.”³⁶⁰ Here Freud was trying to delve beyond endopsychic reality, to find a way into metapsychology, to return to dealing with the demonic power of nature. The same repetition that nature continually offers us in the processes of its forms emerges everywhere in the life of the psyche: not just in the fort-da (gone-there) repeated by the child who makes the wooden reel disappear and reappear always to control his worry over his mother’s absence; not just in the dreams of someone who is suffering from traumatic neurosis and always goes back to those dreams to encounter the trauma; not just in the behavior of the patient who, when urged by transference neurosis, acts out those personal elements repressed rather than remembering them; not just in the history of the embryo that is “obliged in the course of its development to recapitulate the structures of all the forms from which it is sprung, instead of proceeding quickly by the shortest path to its final shape” (all cases discussed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle).³⁶¹ There is another repetition, even more subtle and menacing, which is given as an example in The Uncanny to introduce repetition-compulsion and not mentioned again in Beyond the Pleasure Principle—a roaming, uncontrollable repetition: that of casual signs that accumulate, that suggest a nexus, a “secret meaning.” Here the repetition is hybrid, it forms a part of the changeable scene of the outside world and, at the same time, of the mental scene where it comes to claim its place. The repetition of a sign in the outside world transforms it into an omen: it suggests a significance whose origin we don’t know and cannot ignore. Every meaning that we ourselves have not established or produced is uncanny. The coincidences are uncanny because they suggest a destiny, a network of significances that precede us, accompany us, are playing about with us.