The return of negation : the doppelganger in Freud's "The 'Uncanny'"

The Doppelgänger as a motif arose within German Romanticism and became a canonical theme in "Gothic" literature. The term was coined by Jean Paul in his novel Siebenkäs, published in 1796. Authors such as E.T.A. Hoffmann and Edgar Alan Poe exemplify the originary narratives of the motif and theme of the Doppelgänger. 1 Doppelgänger characters tend to be associated with evil and the demonic; thus one can infer that the Doppelgänger presents a notion of the subject/subjectivity that is defective, disjunct, split, threatening, spectral. With the rise of psycho-analysis, such epithets are taken to indicate a tendency toward a sense of failure or loss in the self. Thereafter, the Doppelgänger has been commonly viewed as an aberration, the stencil of a symptomatology of the self. In what follows I will challenge such a Doppelgänger as the construct of a content-based understanding of fictional motifs and themes, couched in psychoanalytic terminology. To this end, I will re-evaluate the history of the relation between the Doppelgänger and psychoanalysis. Admittedly, psychological symptoms or forms of subjective failure can be inferred in the literary instances of the Doppelgänger. However, the Doppelgänger retains the potential to be articulated in positive terms. But this can only come to light by questioning the unproblematic equating of content – either as the plot of the story, or as the history of a self – with a stable and retrievable origin. When the notion of origin is no longer a simple "content," then the Doppelgänger.