doppelgänger

or dop·pel·gang·er (dŏp'əl-găng'ər, -gĕng'-)
n.
A ghostly double of a living person, especially one that haunts its fleshly counterpart.

[German, a double : doppel, double (from French double; see double) + Gänger, goer (from Gang, a going , from Middle High German ganc , from Old High German).]

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The coinage of the term Doppelgänger (commonly Anglicized as ‘doppelganger’) is not certain, but it was a sufficiently unfamiliar term for the writer Jean Paul Richter to have to gloss it in a footnote to his novel, Siebenkäs, of 1796. According to this founding definition Doppelgänger (literally ‘doublegoer’, by contrast with the German Einzelgänger, or loner) is the name given to ‘people who see themselves’. It seems, then, that there is uncertainty from the start as to whether the apparently original self or its alter ego is the double in question. This indicates the fundamental level at which the phenomenon challenges conventions of identity, by making the self see itself double (or, more precisely, see itself going double, as a duplicate body which may go its own way).

Seeing is the primary category here; the Doppelgänger, as it appears and reappears in literary and other cultures, is above all a thing of visual fascination and terror. It corresponds in this sense to the clinical condition of autoscopy: the relatively rare cases of psychological bilocation where individuals see themselves in another body. But the Doppelgänger challenges the location of the self in a coherent and singular body in other ways as well. Thus, it specializes in ventriloquism, appropriating the voice as sound-image of a bodily identity (more akin in this to the clinical shape of schizophrenia). In most cases of the Doppelgänger, sound and image work together to ensure potentially successful imposture.

Classic literary cases like R. L. Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde show how the Doppelgänger may appropriate the body in particular in order to commit excesses of violence and sex. In the case of Jekyll and Hyde, this appropriation works through metamorphosis, a violent changing of bodily shape, rather than the purloining of a body's original appearance, its mirror-image, its portrait, or its shadow (as in the many variations on the myth of the Schlehmihl figure who sold his shadow to the devil). Thus notions of doubling involve not only replications of identity, but also transformations in identity, where the self appears to be in the wrong body. A case which combines the two possibilities would be Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray.

At its extreme, transformation into an other self can challenge perhaps the most primary of bodily identifications: that of gender. The Doppelgänger as a cultural construct has been largely the preserve of men, representing the Faustian prerogative to be split between two souls or identities. In the canonical versions of the Doppelgänger story any cases of female doubling tend to be a symptom of objectification for the schismatic desires of a male subject rather than exploring the possibility of constitutional splits in female subjectivity. The eponymous protagonist of Robert Musil's Man without Qualities is doubled by his twin sister, but, given that the female form — Doppelgängerin — has no proper currency in German, the transgender double can only be framed here as the ‘Doppelgänger in the other sex’. If the Doppelgänger is indeed gendered male, then it frequently embodies gender trouble for the masculine subject.

As a cultural figure or figment, the Doppelgänger has a special relationship to theories grounded in the psychosomatic. It recurrently operates against the context of scientific or pseudo-scientific theories of psychological schism, and especially of the constituent splitting of bodily and psychic identities. It is supplied variously by mystical theories of the astral body, by the conjecture of animal magnetism, and by the subsequent cults of hypnosis and somnambulism. And it sees a resurgence in the early twentieth century as a corollary of psychoanalytic theories of the split ego. Indeed, in the culture of Modernism, it can be seen as figuring the ambivalent fascination which Freudian psychoanalysis held for contemporary literature and film. Early cinema in the style of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari offered a particularly apt medium for the projection of double identities, for case-histories on release from the cabinets of Drs Freud and company. For Freud, the Doppelgänger is the archetypal figure of the uncanny, embodying the return of the repressed, of all that ‘should have remained hidden but has emerged’ to haunt the security of the psychic household.

While it has been conventional to follow Tzvetan Todorov in seeing the extensive theorization of the split self in psychoanalysis as producing the endgame of the Doppelgänger as cultural construct, this now seems premature. The post-Freudian age yields no shortage of material for a reactivation of the Gothic bogey-man. Feminism helps enable the bogey-man to become a bogey-woman, a Doppelgängerin proper (such as in Emma Tennant's reworking of Stevenson's strange case as that of Ms Jekyll and Mrs Hyde in her Two Women of London). The troubling of corporeal and psychological identity in the age of computer and genetic science, and the projections of alternative identities afforded by film and other media, also open up new dimensions for the Doppelgänger. The likes of David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers or Kryzstof Kieslowski's Double Life of Veronique would suggest that the late twentieth-century cultural psyche was not simply at home in, and at one with, its body.

— Alan W. Cuthbert

See also hallucination; psychological disorders; psychosomatic illness.

(or autoscopy)
The term given to the experience of meeting one's own 'double'. The apparition takes the form of a mirror image of the viewer (see mirror reversal), facing him and just beyond arm's reach. It is life-sized and may move. Indeed, it usually replicates the viewer's posture, facial expressions, and movements as though it were his reflection. But beyond these features, reported experiences show several differences from the stereotype of popular imagination. First, the image is usually transparent: it has been described as being 'like jelly', or like a film projected on glass. (But it is not blurred or misty — its details are quite clear.) Secondly, it is generally monochromatic; if colour is observed, it is described as dull or 'washed out'. And thirdly, although the apparition may be inferred to include the whole figure, only the face, or head and trunk, are commonly 'seen'.

As reported by normal people, doppelgänger experiences occur most often late at night or at dawn. They are rare, occurring during periods of stress or fatigue and in conjunction with disturbed consciousness. (However, the first recorded account, which is attributed to Aristotle, describes a man who could not go out for a walk without meeting his 'double'.) A doppelgänger episode is usually of very short duration with normal people, lasting only a few seconds. The experience is more common among delirious patients, among those with brain lesions in the parieto-occipital regions, or, most notably, among epileptics, where it may be part of a complex partial seizure. Autoscopy can occasionally be a feature of an attack of migraine, sometimes in association with a sense of distortion of a part of the body. The doppelgänger experience, when the subject sees himself standing behind his back or in another room, is referred to as an extracampine hallucination.

The fact that an apparition is presumed in most cultures to be a visitor from the grave, a spirit of the dead, may well account for the morbid response accorded the doppelgänger experience. After all, the subject is apparently being accosted by his own ghost, which not only raises some knotty questions about the nature of time, but bears the distinct implication that the subject's own time is up. Indeed, the German folk belief was that the doppelgänger was a harbinger of death. Like many old wives' tales, this superstitious belief may have had a factual basis, for in those cases where doppelgänger is associated with severe brain injury or cerebral thrombosis, the illness is often fatal.

The idea of a phantom 'double' has existed throughout recorded history, and still flourishes in superstitions, fairy tales, and folklore throughout the world. It is taken seriously by some parapsychologists as an example of an out-of-body experience. It figures in many primitive religions, where the 'double' is assumed to be the person's soul. Witches and shamans put their 'doubles' to good use, sending them on occult errands or as representatives or intermediaries. But the doppelgänger concept has also intrigued sophisticated people, and induced in them a dread of the unknown and a morbid assumption of doom akin to the responses of primitive groups. Autoscopic phenomena have frequently been described in the literature of the Western world, always in terms of sinister foreboding or impending tragedy. Descriptions have figured in the works of Dostoevsky, Kafka, de Maupassant, Edgar Allan Poe, Steinbeck, and Oscar Wilde. It is of interest that several of these suffered from epilepsy or cerebral disorder.

Doppelgänger experiences have attracted little medical or psychological study, despite widespread interest. Traditionally, the phenomenon has been classified as a visual hallucination, and its form can be examined in the same terms as other hallucinations. But an added dimension is that the experience is not limited to the visual modality; many subjects have reported that they could 'hear' and 'feel' their doubles. This multi-modality suggests the intriguing possibility that doppelgänger may in some way represent an externalization or displacement of Sir Henry Head's 'body schema'. However, why should the apparition appear as a mirror image?

(Published 1987)

— Graham F. Reed

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[G.] a ghostly counterpart of a living person

IN BRIEF: A ghostly counterpart and companion of a person.

He thinks he is so unlikeable that not even his doppelganger would befriend him.

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For a list of words related to Doppelgänger, see:

• German, Greek, and Other Languages - Doppelgänger: German. phantom double
• Individuals and Objects - Doppelgänger: ghostly double of living person

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