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This study grew out of a fascination with the double, a phenomenon now attracting much interest. This paper defines the double and doubling; describes certain techniques of character creation in fiction generally and in double literature in particular; distinguishes the double from what it is not, the foil; identifies archetypal double plots; and discusses the myth and psychic forces underlying double literature. The concept of the double has evolved from simple to more complex forms; the paper imitates this movement, moving from investigation of the double to that of multiple personality.
What is the double? Doubles are of two kinds. Either the double is an exact replica, mirror image, or identical twin (as in Plautus' Menaechmi or Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors) or the double is one's other self, a self irrupting from the unconscious, that is antithetical yet complementary to one's conscious self—as in many works of Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Dostoevsky, and Conrad, among others. Such a double or antiself is, as Freud remarks in his essay “The Uncanny,” both strange yet familiar, hostile yet sympathetic.7 It is with the second, more fascinating and sophisticated kind of double that this investigation is chiefly concerned.
Where does the double originally come from? One is driven back to primitive man and myth for the answer. Otto Rank's The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study is an interesting book by a psychoanalyst on the subject.18 Rank explores the mythological and ethnological as well as the literary and psychological sources of the double. The double