Otto Rank's Der Doppelgänger, a psychoanalytic classic published in 1914 and amplified in 1925, has finally been translated into English. We can now enjoy this paper which we have known chiefly from Freud's reference to it in The Uncanny (1919). A monumental study in applied analysis, a remarkable contribution to and elucidation of narcissism, it first appeared in the same year as On Narcissism: An Introduction.

The bulk of the book consists of the amassing of literary tales and anthropological data regarding doubles. Rank introduces us to a film, The Student of Prague, in which a man surrenders his mirror image to a daemonic antagonist with whom he completes a Faustian pact. His reflection returns to haunt him until the hero's shooting his double results in his own death. In other novels and stories the double is a shadow or a person identical with the hero,