The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study (Maresfield Library) [Paperback]

Otto Rank (Author)

Book Description

Series: Maresfield Library | Publication Date: January 1, 1989

I am convinced beyond doubt that this is a book that is a must read" by all clinicians whether psychotherapists or psychoanalysts. The vignettes illustrate clearly psychoanalytic concepts that are usually difficult to grasp and quite useful for teaching purposes." Dr Antoine Hani, Director of the Institute of Psychoanalysis, Washington.

Product Details

• Paperback: 88 pages
• Publisher: Karnac Books (January 1, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0946439583
• ISBN-13: 978-0946439584
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,144,187 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A milestone in psychoanalytic literary criticism., April 6, 2001

By 

darragh o'donoghue - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study (Maresfield Library) (Paperback)

A recurring figure in European literature, especially of a gothic sort, is the double, an identical figure who appears to torment the hero in works such as Poe's 'William Wilson', Hoffmann's 'The Doubles' and Doestoevsky's 'The Double'. One night Otto Rank, an Austrian disciple of Freud who later broke away from his master, watched a film on this theme, Wegener's 'The Student of Prague', leading him to ponder it from a psychoanalytic viewpoint, resulting in this famous 1914 study.

firstly, he discusses the multitude of literary examples, including Musset, Stevenson, Maupassant and Wilde, and the different kinds of doubles - literal doubles, shadows, reflections, portraits, psychological projections, fathers/brothers (it's always men), past/future selves etc. More dubiously, he then analyses the mental biographies of the authors.

There follows a review of the anthropological origins of the double figure - e.g. as a symbol of in/fertility and masculine im/potency, or the soul - utilising a lot of now outmoded, pre-pre-structuralist material, and much use of terms like 'primitives' and 'savages'. Finally, he discusses the double in relation to the theory of narcissism, seeing the trope originating as a positive symbol of both sexual desire and immortality, both ways of warding off the ego-threatening dissolution of death.

Rank has a lot of interesting material here, but he is so limited by his psychoanalytic framework that his few insights, after so many exhausting lists, seem superficial (Freud, in 'the Uncanny' is much more open and convincing). His methodology is wayward, and while never syntactically obscure in the manner of Lacan, it is often difficult to make out what he's saying intellectually.

3.0 out of 5 stars Not as in-depth as one would expect, January 9, 2012

By 

Cary Shay (Canterbury, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study (Paperback)

This text is one of the first (if not the first) studies of the phenomenon of the double as it appears in western literature and culture. It purports to be grounded in the principles of classical psychoanalysis, but is really rather disappointing on that score, and others. If you are looking for a text that catalogs 19th and early 20th century appearances of the doppelgänger in literature, this text will fit your needs. Rank describes these appearances fairly exhaustively, and he separates the examples of the doppelgänger into helpful categories. However, he touches only lightly on the psychoanalytical significance of these examples and he refrains from attempting any general theory of the doppelgänger. The final page comes close to a conclusion, but there is a certain level of ambiguity throughout which is, perhaps, justified given that he was breaking new ground.

It is also important to remember that the book is dated and therefore limited in scope. For example, Rank spends time discussing the mental trials and traumas of the authors who use the motif, ascribing an autobiographical basis for its employment. This is potentially the case in some of his examples but is not relevant in contemporary terms. Rank makes some general points about how and why the double appears, i.e. the paradoxical case of the suicide who destroys himself, projecting his fear onto the double, in order to escape the fear of death. Chiefly he defers to Freud, leaving to him the finer points of psychoanalytical theory which may be said to underlie the appearance of the double. (See for example Freud's essays 'The Uncanny', 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle', etc.) Rank provides a chapter on the anthropological significance of the doppelgänger, but the chapter disintegrates into a further survey of the literary appearances of the motif, which had already been covered ad infinitum in the previous chapter.

There are a handful of contemporary studies of the doppelgänger which are far more in depth, although they are also heavily theoretical (see Vardoulakis, Webber). Rank's study is brief, a mere 86 pages. It is certainly helpful and worth the read, but it remains only a preliminary study of this phenomenon.