Article
The Double
Der Doppelgänger
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.
Main ideas
- The Student of Prague (1913) is the starting point. The double appears precisely at moments of love and finally kills its original. The film's own allegory of an inescapable past is judged insufficient, and its dreamlike imagery is taken to expose the problem of a person's relation to their own ego.
- The double takes four forms in literature. It can be a detached shadow or mirror image (Hoffmann, Chamisso, Andersen, Lenau), a flesh-and-blood look-alike (Hoffmann's The Devil's Elixirs, Jean Paul's Siebenkäs, Poe, Dostoevsky), a portrait (Wilde's Dorian Gray), or an invisible or hallucinated companion (Maupassant's Le Horla, Musset). Cases of alternating double consciousness are set aside.
- Some features recur across authors. The double is identical down to name, voice and dress, is often seen in a mirror, and obstructs the hero, above all in love. The catastrophe comes about through a woman. The attempt to kill the double ends in the hero's own death, often within a picture of paranoid persecution, drawn most exactly in Dostoevsky's Golyadkin.
- The authors share a constitution. Hoffmann, Jean Paul, Poe, Maupassant, Musset, Raimund, Dostoevsky and others are presented as pathological personalities, marked by mental illness, addiction or sexual excess, intense preoccupation with their own ego, experiences of seeing themselves, and an inability to love. Rank holds that this shared psychic structure, more than literary borrowing, explains why their doubles are alike.
- Shadow superstitions: a missing or headless shadow, or the sight of one's own double, foretells death within the year. Injuring a shadow harms its owner, and the devil covets human shadows. Following Rochholz, the shadow is seen as first a protective spirit that later turned into a persecuting herald of death.
- Shadow, reflection and soul: drawing on Tylor, Frazer and Rohde, Rank shows that many peoples use one word for shadow, reflection and soul. The Homeric psyche, the Egyptian ka and the Roman genius were conceived as a second self, an exact image of the body.
- Mirror and portrait beliefs include covering mirrors after a death, broken mirrors as omens, fear of being painted or photographed, and mirror divination concerned above all with one's own lifespan. Myths of Dionysus and Gnostic teachings give self-reflection a generative and erotic meaning.
- The myth of Narcissus joins the deathly and the erotic meanings of the reflection. Rank disputes Frazer's view that self-love was a later explanation added to a death superstition. Citing Freud's 'The Theme of the Three Caskets', he treats the replacement of death by love as a return to an original link between the two.
- Narcissism and its defence: Dorian Gray shows love of one's own image most openly. The narcissist is ambivalent toward his ego. The defence appears as dread of the reflection or as its 'loss', which is really its growing independence and power, a return of the repressed within the repressing force.
- Paranoia and the brother: Freud analysed paranoia as a fixation in narcissism. Following him, Rank sees the persecutor as the once most-loved person, who here is the ego itself. The double is often a brother or twin, which partly accounts for its role as rival in love and for the death wish against it.
- Guilt, fear of death and suicide: guilt pushes the hero to lay his condemned impulses on a second self, the devil or later a warning conscience. The wish to stay young masks fear of death, and what is unbearable is the anticipation of death. Killing the double is a painless suicide of a split-off bad self, carried out by one who loves his ego too much to strike it directly.
- The soul as a denial of death: what Rank calls primitive narcissism, like the child's, knows nothing of death. The first idea of the soul was an exact double of the body, an early form of belief in immortality. 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.
What it shows
Gallery
Cover of Imago III/2 (April 1914), edited by Sigmund Freud with Otto Rank and Hanns Sachs, the issue in which "Der Doppelgänger" first appeared (Leipzig and Vienna: Hugo Heller, 1914) 
Title page of the first separate book edition, "Der Doppelgänger: Eine psychoanalytische Studie" by Otto Rank (Leipzig, Vienna, Zurich: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1925)
