8/2/2019 Read This First(1)

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(From the first 3 chapters of the book):

[A] question either of a physical double [], or of a likeness which has been

detached from the ego and become an individual being (shadow, reflection, portrait.)

[] the representationally opposite form of expression of the same psychic

constellation: the representation, of one and the same person, of two distinct beings

separated by amnesia. These cases of double-consciousness have also been observed

clinically (Rank 20).

Apart from the figure of the double, that takes the form of various types, all

these tales exhibit a series of coinciding motifs []. We always find a likeness which

resembles the main character down to the smallest particulars, such as name, voice,

and clothing a likeness, which, as though stolen from the mirror (Hoffmann),

primarily appears to the main character as a reflection. Always, too, this double works

at cross-purposes with its prototype; and, as a rule, the catastrophe occurs in the

relationship with a woman, predominantly ending in suicide by the way of death

intended for the irksome prosecutor. In a number of instances this situation is

combined with a thoroughgoing persecutory delusion or is even replaced by it, thus

assuming the picture of a total paranoiac system of delusions.

Taking notice of these typical traits shared by a succession of writers is aimed

not so much at proving their literary interdependence in some cases just as positive

as it is impossible in others as at calling attention to the identical psychic structure

of these authors, which we now intend to consider somewhat more closely (33).

[]The typically recurring basic ways in which these forms appear do not

become intelligible from the writers individual personality. Indeed, to a certain

degree they seem to be alien to it, inappropriate, and contrary to his way of otherwise

viewing the world. These are the odd representations of the double as a shadow,

mirror-image, or portrait, the meaningful evaluation of which we do not quite

understand even though we can follow it emotionally. In the writer, as in his reader, a

super-individual factor seems to be unconsciously vibrating here, lending to these

motifs a mysterious psychic resonance. The purpose of the following section is to use

ethnographic, folkloric, and mythological traditions to demonstrate the part played by

ethnopsychology and to relate to it those individually revived features which have the

same meaning. The section also intends to prepare us to notice the common

psychological basis of the superstitious and artistic representation of these impulses

(48).