Proximities to Death: Freud’s Archaic Doubles

Abstract

This chapter takes up the determinative power of the double in the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud, which in its further extensions is anticipated by the distinction between the conscious and the unconscious. As a transition from the previous chapter, I begin with Freud’s essay on Dostoevsky. But the focus here is primarily on the characteristics of the primal horde depicted in the essays that comprise Totem and Taboo, which focuses on the fundamental ambivalence toward the totem animal, which is both worshipped and then killed and eaten, a literary setup for the actual killing of the father. Finally, I take up the fundamentally conflicted relation between the erotic instincts and the death instincts.