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.