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In the spring of 1922, Sigmund Freud wrote to Arthur Schnitzler to congratulate him on reaching his sixtieth birthday. In this now famous letter, Freud felt moved to make a confession so ‘intimate’ that he prefaced it with a request that Schnitzler share it with no one. ‘I have tormented myself with the question of why in all these years I have actually never made the attempt to seek out your society and carry on a conversation with you … I believe I have avoided you out of a sort of fear of my double.1 As I shall demonstrate through a series of reflections on this imagined doubling and its reception, Freud's ambivalent desire for his literary other goes to the heart of both theoretical and historical questions regarding the nature of psychoanalysis.
Whatever Freud was reading—or misreading—in identifying with Schnitzler as he did, there are in fact very interesting coincidences between both the life and the work of the two men. Indeed, for many commentators, the 1955 publication of this intimate confession constituted confirmation of a fundamental kinship between Schnitzler's modernist texts and Freudian psychoanalysis. However, doubling lies in the realm of the uncanny, where anxieties about the loss of self mingle with the ancient longing to merge with the other. Freud's ‘impression’ that the literary artist ‘knows by intuition—or really as a consequence of acute self-observation—everything I have uncovered via laborious work on other people’ is as much a strategy of differentiation as an expression of identification1.
Schnitzler himself resisted both positive and negative dimensions of this perceived doubling and—in his diaries, but also in his responses to