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Freud’s dream of the double

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Abstract

While the motif of the double serves a prominent role in Freud’s writings from early on, this essay is an examination of the determinative power of the double in two key texts, texts in which specific, new sets doubles emerge for the first time in Freud’s career. Totem and Taboo features a double that manifests itself primarily in the form of ambivalence. Beyond the Pleasure Principle features a double that manifests itself primarily in the form of a very peculiar conflict that also entails complicity.

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Notes

  1. This essay is part of a book-length philosophy project on the double, which touches on a range of texts and topics.

  2. Freud (1989, p. 24).

  3. Freud (1989, p. 38).

  4. Freud (1989, p. 39).

  5. Freud 1989, pp. 40–41).

  6. My insertion.

  7. Freud (1989, p. 41).

  8. Freud (1989, p. 43).

  9. Freud (1989, p. 65).

  10. Freud (1989, p. 68).

  11. Freud (1989, p. 71).

  12. Freud (1989, pp. 71–73).

  13. Freud (1989, p. 75).

  14. Freud (1989, p. 76).

  15. Freud (1989, p. 77).

  16. Freud (1989, p. 83).

  17. Freud (1989, p. 89).

  18. Freud (1989, p. 89)

  19. Cf. Freud (1963).

  20. Freud (1989, p. 195).

  21. Freud (1989, p. 200).

  22. Freud (1989, pp. 99–101).

  23. Freud (1989, p. 116).

  24. Freud (1989, p. 133).

  25. Freud (1989, p. 150).

  26. Freud (1989, p. 153).

  27. Freud (1989, p. 155).

  28. Freud (1989, p. 155).

  29. Freud (1989, p. 166).

  30. Durkheim (1995).

  31. Freud (1989, p. 141).

  32. Freud (1989, p. 167).

  33. Cf. Seitz and Thorp (2013).

  34. Freud (1989, p. 169).

  35. Freud (1989, p. 170).

  36. Freud (1989, p. 171).

  37. Freud (1989, p. 174).

  38. Freud (1989, p. 175).

  39. Freud (1989, p. 175).

  40. Freud (1989, p. 176).

  41. To be explicit, Freud implies that the original social organization is that of the brothers, whose commonality is derived from their original lack of access to women. I will not linger over this topic but will make a direct linkage with political philosophy by observing that, as is the case with all modernist images of a state of nature, the social organization that follows the founding act—in this case, the Oedipal murder—presupposes social organization. Cf. Seitz and Thorp (2013).

  42. Freud 1989, p. 178).

  43. Freud 1989, p. 181).

  44. For example, the fiction of social contract theory.

  45. Freud (1989, p. 194).

  46. Freud 1961, p. 1).

  47. Freud (1961, p. 3).

  48. Cf. The extended mockery of the notion of “advantage” or “profit” in Part I, Section VII in Dostoevsky (1994).

  49. Freud had introduced these concepts in his 1911 essay, “Two Principles of Mental Functioning,”.

  50. Freud (1961, p. 11).

  51. Freud (1961, p. 12).

  52. Freud (1961, p. 14).

  53. Freud (1961, p. 16).

  54. Freud (1961, p. 18).

  55. Freud (1961, p. 19).

  56. Freud (1961, p. 21).

  57. Freud (1961, p. 22).

  58. Freud (1961, p. 23).

  59. Freud (1961, p. 26).

  60. Freud (1961, p. 27).

  61. Freud (1961, p. 29).

  62. Freud (1961, p. 30).

  63. Freud (1961, p. 31).

  64. Freud (1961, pp. 31–32).

  65. Freud (1961, p. 43).

  66. Freud (1961, pp. 43–44).

  67. Freud (1961, p. 47).

  68. Freud (1961, p. 50).

  69. Freud (1961, p. 51).

  70. Freud (1961, p. 52).

  71. Freud (1961, p. 53).

  72. Freud (1961, p. 57).

  73. The first Freudian text that Derrida’s wide-ranging “Archive Fever” touches on is Civilization and Its Discontents, and the first prominent problem it addresses is Freud’s recognition of the death drive and the relation between Eros and Thanatos.

References

  • Derrida, Jacques. 1995. Archive fever: A Freudian impression (trans. Eric Prenowitz). Diacritics 25: 9–63.

  • Dostoevsky, Fyodor. 1994. Notes from underground (trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky). New York: Vintage.

  • Durkheim, Emile. 1995. The elementary forms of religious life (trans. Karen E. Fields). New York: Free Press.

  • Freud, Sigmund. 1961. Beyond the pleasure principle (trans. and ed. James Strachey). New York: W.W. Norton.

  • Freud, Sigmund. 1963. Dostoevsky and parricide. In Character and culture, ed. Phillip Rieff. New York: Collier Books.

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  • Freud, Sigmund. 1989. Totem and taboo: Some points of agreement between the mental lives of savages and neurotics (trans. and ed. James Strachey). New York: W.W. Norton.

  • Seitz, Brian, and Thomas Thorp. 2013. The Iroquois and the Athenians: a political ontology, 2013. Lanham, MD: Lexington/Rowman & Littlefield.

    Google Scholar 

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the Babson Faculty Research Fund for its generous support.

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  1. Babson College, Wellesley, MA, USA

    Brian Seitz

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  1. Brian Seitz
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Correspondence to Brian Seitz.

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Seitz, B. Freud’s dream of the double. Cont Philos Rev 47, 177–193 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-014-9293-1

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