The obsession with the double: doppelgängers, Jekyll and Hide, Frankenstein, and more

The double as a literary motif has obsessed writers since the beginning of Romanticism: Poe, Hoffman, Maupassant, Dostoevsky and Beckett to name just a few. Incidentally, Sylvia Plath wrote her thesis on the double in two Dostoyevsky novels. Her thesis claims that both Ivan, of The Brothers Karamazov, and Golyadkin, of The Double, have attempted to repress troubling aspects of their personalities, resulting in the double. The drama and mystery of this theme has had a natural continuation into cinema with films, Dead Ringers as the perfect example.

The drama of the double is an encounter with another the divided self, with a part that is too...(wild, selfish, bad, childish) to be claimed. That double articulates something deeply familiar to the psyche that has merely become unfamiliar owing to repression of the “permeable”. 

Otto Rank links the doubling to narcissism. My article about Joseph Conrad's The N**** In The Narcissus examines the double in this novel as the crew which could be interpreted as the superego, and the black man who is our subconscious. 

The whole culture in Christopher Lasch’s terms is a narcissistic one as prone to fragmentation of the individuals who make it up. Object relations theory studies the internal mental representation of self and others... Form templates by which subsequent perceptions, especially of self and others, are shaped and defined. Splitting (see Melanie Klein, see pre Oedipal) demarcates pleasure and pain, love and hate. It is a difference that tolerates no ambiguity. Next stage is repression which tolerates ambiguity: the Oedipal period.

Splitting characterized by polymerization and separation. Projective identification is the attribution of split off characteristics to another and the continued identification with those characteristics through control of the other in fantasy or reality. Introjection is the attribution of the others characteristics to the self. Psychological content is exchanged between self and non-self without a loss of boundary.

Myths can be thought as a verbalization of rituals. This collective dream of a community of people expands our sense of self, finding what is lost, seeking to be whole.

Demeter: Demeter and Persephone are goddesses of the grain, the old grain and the new.

Quintessential intrapsychic double is Oedipus. He doesn't know he is the killer of the king his father nor that he has replaced him in his mother's bed. "I" is the basis of his search, although he becomes increasingly uncomfortable as he gets nearer the truth. He discovers that instead of two there is one: he is father and brother to his children, son and husband. There is permeability between the savior of his people and the killer. He is brutal with the old Shepherd who saved him as a baby. He treats Tiresias the blind prophet with contempt when he will turn into a blind prophet himself. Oedipus behaved with hubris when he ran into the King on the road, this hubris that leads him both to his doom and tragic insight.

Tragedy is the ritual celebration of sacrifice and renewal. Oedipus’ search for what turns out to be his own identity is central to psychoanalysis.

Object relations theory considers more the myth of narcissus then Oedipus as key to the pre-oedipal dilemmas of our world. Psychological basis of modern drama and film is pre-oedipal. The relationship to the mother is dyadic. Oedipal is Triadic, genitally focused. 

Dyonisus: myths seeks to overcome death and insure fertility. Greek drama grew out of activity rituals. Dionysus is god of wine, theater and fertility. Nietzche: Dionysus is the archetype of tragic drama: Dionysian/ apollonian division is also doubling..

Orestes. Murders his own mother - violence is often associated with doubling. Inverted version of Oedipus is also a fundamental type of tragic hero. Doubling relationship between them, and in his relationship to his sister Electra who becomes his mother and himself.

Doppelganger: the other who the protagonist encounters as another self or part of the self but he is stronger. In Narcissus, Tiresias informs the water nymph Lirione that her son will live as long as he does not know himself. Narcissus cannot survive self-knowledge, unlike Oedipus.

 

Doubling involves splitting and multiplication. Darwin: man is an animal, he influences the double in 19th and 20th Century. About the Fuegians in South America, Darwin vacillates between recognitions of common Humanity and shocked registers of savage otherness. 

Civilized subjects are now confronted with the proximity of primitive Origins and impulses in every human being. The double was explored in Greek literature, but Darwinism and psychology bring it back. A child as it grows turns to other objects to love. If not he becomes a narcissistic: grandiosity. The object relations theory focuses on narcissism more than Oedipus.

The rise of new Sciences brings the double to the fore. Before, the order of creation was God - man - animal. Now these borders are blurred: a godlike man creates, man is an animal, god is dead. Frankenstein is a case of double, in fact we call the monster after his creator. 

Modern protagonists have only fleeting insights about their condition or about their selves, insights that they are unable to sustain. The second self is the shadowed shelf surrounded by uncanniness, who knows secrets.

Many remarks above are inspired by The Drama of The Double, a book by Katherine H. Burkman that is warmly recommended for anyone interested in reading deeper about this subject.