Concept
Double
The figure of a second self — a twin, shadow, reflection or look-alike — studied psychoanalytically by Otto Rank across literature, folklore and belief. Rank read the double as a creation of primitive narcissism: first an assurance against the destruction of the self and the forerunner of the idea of an immortal soul, it later returns as an uncanny persecutor and harbinger of death. Freud took up the motif in his essay on the uncanny.
Development
1914
introduced by Otto Rank
Rank's 1914 Imago study made the double a psychoanalytic theme, reading it as a narcissistic defence against death.
In The Double (1914)
1919
developed by Sigmund Freud
In Das Unheimliche Freud drew on Rank's study to explain the uncanniness of the double.
In The 'Uncanny' (1919)
Relations
- 1914 introduced by Otto Rank
Rank's 1914 Imago study made the double a psychoanalytic theme, reading it as a narcissistic defence against death.
- 1919 developed by Sigmund Freud
In Das Unheimliche Freud drew on Rank's study to explain the uncanniness of the double.
Works
- 1914
Otto Rank's "Der Doppelgänger", published in the third volume of Imago in 1914 and later reissued in book form (1925), is a psychoanalytic study of the motif of the double. Rank starts from a recent film, Hanns Heinz Ewers's The Student of Prague (1913). In it a poor student sells his mirror image to a sinister stranger. The image takes on a life of its own: it appears at each stage of his courtship of a countess and kills his rival in a duel. When the student finally shoots at it, the shot kills him instead. The film's programme reads the double as the hero's inescapable past. Rank finds this allegory insufficient, because it does not explain why the double intervenes precisely at moments of love, or why losing it and attacking it are so fatal. He argues that the dreamlike imagery of cinema makes visible the deeper problem of a person's relation to their own ego. The study then proceeds in three steps. The first surveys literary treatments of the double: - E. T. A. Hoffmann: the lost mirror image of the New Year's Eve adventures, The Devil's Elixirs, Die Doppeltgänger and Kater Murr. - Chamisso's shadowless Peter Schlemihl, Andersen's "The Shadow" and Lenau's "Anna". - Jean Paul, who brought the double into Romanticism, and Raimund's Der Alpenkönig und der Menschenfeind and Der Verschwender. - Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and Heine. - Maupassant's "Le Horla" and "Lui", and Musset's "La nuit de décembre". - Poe's "William Wilson" and Dostoevsky's The Double. Rank finds features that recur across these works. The double resembles the hero down to the smallest detail and often appears in a mirror. It thwarts him, above all in his relation to a woman. When the hero kills it, the act turns out to be his own suicide. In several cases the story amounts to a picture of paranoid persecution. The second step finds a common psychological type among these authors. Rank describes them as pathological personalities prone to mental illness, alcohol, drugs or sexual excess, intensely preoccupied with their own ego, and either incapable of love or driven by an overstrained longing for it. The third step turns to folklore and ethnology, drawing on Frazer, Tylor, Rochholz, Negelein and Rohde. It covers: - superstitions that tie the shadow and the mirror image to death; - taboos on shadows, mirrors and portraits among the peoples Rank calls primitive; - languages that use one word for shadow, reflection and soul; - the Homeric psyche, the Egyptian ka and the Roman genius as doubles of the person; - the myth of Narcissus, which joins the deathly and the erotic meanings of the reflection. In the closing section Rank interprets the double through Freud's recent work on narcissism, paranoia and animism. Love of one's own image coexists with a defence against it. That defence shows itself as fear and loathing of the reflection, or as persecution by a double that has become independent. Following Freud on paranoia, Rank traces the persecutor back to the once most-loved person, who here is the ego itself. Identification with a rival brother adds to the double's role as a competitor in love. A strong sense of guilt leads the hero to place responsibility for his condemned impulses on a second self: the devil, or in later versions a warning conscience. A threatened narcissism explains the fear of death, the wish to stay young and the suicide of the doomed heroes. Unable to destroy his beloved ego directly, the hero kills it in the shape of the hated double. Rank links this to the history of belief in the soul. He holds that primitive narcissism knows nothing of death. The first idea of the soul was therefore an exact double of the body, an assurance of survival that denied death. Yet the double, created to ward off annihilation, returns in superstition as a herald of death, just as the double that embodies self-love becomes a rival in sexual love.
- 1919
Freud's essay, published in the fifth volume of Imago in 1919, takes up a question he says aesthetics has neglected: what sets the uncanny apart within the wider class of the frightening. Against Ernst Jentsch, who in 1906 traced the feeling to intellectual uncertainty before the new and unfamiliar, Freud argues that the uncanny is the kind of fright that leads back to what is known of old and long familiar. He reaches this by two routes. The first is linguistic: entries from the dictionaries of Sanders and of the Grimms show heimlich ranging from 'homely, familiar' to 'concealed, secret', until it coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Schelling's remark that the uncanny is whatever ought to have remained hidden and has come to light becomes a key to the essay. The second route is a survey of uncanny experiences and fictions. Reading E. T. A. Hoffmann's 'The Sandman', Freud places the story's effect not in the automaton Olimpia but in the figure who tears out children's eyes, and reads the fear for the eyes as a substitute for castration anxiety, with the good and the bad father split across the tale's paired figures. Following Otto Rank's study of the double, he shows the double turning from an insurance against death, born of primary narcissism, into a harbinger of death, and links it to the self-observing, self-critical agency in the ego. Involuntary repetition of the same, which he ties to a compulsion to repeat in the unconscious, the omnipotence of thoughts, the evil eye, the return of the dead, severed limbs, being buried alive, and the blurring of the line between fantasy and reality are traced in turn to infantile complexes or to surmounted animistic beliefs. The female genitals, which neurotic men often call uncanny, he reads as the entrance to the human being's first home: the prefix 'un-' is the mark of repression. In the last section Freud concedes that his thesis cannot be reversed, and that fairy tales abound in wish-fulfilments and animated objects that are not uncanny at all. He answers these objections by separating the uncanny of experience from the uncanny of fiction and, within experience, the uncanny that comes from repressed infantile complexes from the uncanny that arises when surmounted primitive beliefs seem confirmed once more. Fiction can suspend reality-testing and so spare us the uncanny, as in fairy tales, in Dante, or in Shakespeare's ghosts, or it can heighten the uncanny beyond anything life allows when the writer pretends to stay within common reality. The uncanny of repressed complexes is the more resistant of the two. Because the writer also steers the reader's identification and mood, the same material can turn comic, as in Nestroy or in Wilde's 'The Canterville Ghost'. The uncanniness of solitude, silence and darkness Freud leaves tied to the anxiety of childhood.
See also
People
References
- The Double1914Evidence for a relation
- The 'Uncanny'1919Evidence for a relation