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Beverly: What are you trying to suggest? That I'm gay? My mother wanted girls? What the fuck is this bullshit psychoanalysis?
Claire: Listen, doctor. I think there's something wrong with you. I don't know what it is. I can't put a label on it but you're subtly … I don't know … schizophrenic or something.
Despite Beverly's opinion on the topic, the study of the “Mantle brothers’ case” from a psychoanalytical perspective should allow us to analyze the process through which Elliot and his brother, two identical twins, slowly go into self-destruction and insanity. David Cronenberg1, the director, handles his fictional characters in a sensible, sensitive and accurate way, but despite his insight into mental processes, a few points about the way he has transformed the original twins2 whom he took as models are worth reconsidering.
This essay seeks to assess the psychopathology of the Mantle brothers. To that end, I will have to define precisely the mental (Mantle?) processes they are—and have been—undergoing. In a lengthy article on Dead Ringers , Barbara Creed (1990) uses the twins' trauma to comment on the “narcissistic fantasy which lies … at the heart of masculinity” (146) and argues for a case of male hysteria, a form of neurosis, to describe their behavior. My intention is to show that what Creed analyzes as the response to male castration anxiety and its connection to the process of duplication is not in fact male hysteria, but rather psychosis. The questions I will ask are: What is the Mantle twins' psychological background? How did they evolve the way they have and what might have