Freud's Doppelgaenger

My dear Doctor:

I shall make you a confession ... I have been struggling with the question of why I have never, in all these years, made an effort to meet you ... I think I have avoided you out of a kind of fear of finding my own double [Doppelgaenger Furcht] . . . When I read one of your beautiful works I seem to encounter again and again, behind the poetic fiction, the very presumptions, interests and conclusions so well known to me from my own thoughts . . . Your ability to be deeply moved by the truths of the unconscious, the recurrence of your thoughts to the polarity of love and death--all of this had for me an uncanny familiarity . . . Forgive me for straying into analysis--that is, after all, all I know.

The writer of this letter was none other than Sigmund Freud, and he sent it to famed Viennese Playwright Arthur Schnitzler on May 14, 1922, the eve of Schnitzler's 60th birthday. The letter (printed in Germany in 1955 but not previously published in the U.S.) has now been brought to light by Los Angeles Psychoanalyst Herbert I. Kupper, to make a point about Freud and his theories. It suggests, Dr. Kupper told the American Psychoanalytic Association, not only that Freud was capable of believing in the mystical concept of the Doppelgaenger,* but that his teachings themselves had a striking Doppelgaenger in art.

Youth in Step. Schnitzler, like Freud, was born soon after mid-century in Franz Josef's Austro-Hungarian Empire. Each was his mother's eldest child; each was soon handed over to nursemaids because mother was pregnant again; each was soon bereaved by the death of his next-born brother (Schnitzler at 14 months, Freud at 19). The Schnitzler family was the better off; Freud's father was an unsuccessful wool merchant, while Schnitzler's was a fashionable ear, nose and throat specialist, who basked in limelight reflected from theatrical patients. Both young men became physicians and took up neurology; both went to Nancy to study hypnosis under French psychiatrists; both worked in the Vienna clinic of Neurologist Theodor Meynert. Largely because of their experience there, both abandoned the conventional practice of medicine. (Wrote Schnitzler: "Meynert tried to convince patients with delusions that they could not possibly have them.") There the parallel in their lives ended--at least on the surface.

Freud plunged into psychology and self-analysis, declared himself dedicated forever to the scientific search for the "naked truth." Having lived ascetically before marriage, he lived monogamously thereafter. Schnitzler discovered what he called "fictional truth," had a series of well-publicized affairs with glamorous actresses, and feverishly wrote about a character named Anatol (a thinly disguised self-portrait) who was a gay yet morbid epicure, a dandy with a death wish who thought he had to die to be truly free. Through the turmoil of world war and revolution, Schnitzler wrote play after play (notably Der Reigen or La Ronde) in which the characters were driven by unconscious impulses and riven by unconscious conflicts.

In other respects, too, said Dr. Kupper, "Schnitzler's use of psychoanalytic concepts seems to exhibit the same progressions as Freud's scientific investigations." His early works, e.g., Paracelsus (1897), use hypnosis "as a comic and plot device to penetrate the realms of the unconscious." This was the period when Freud still hoped to put hypnosis to good medical use. Later plays, e.g., Intermezzo, Comedy of Seduction (1905, 1924), stress unconscious motivation of behavior not unlike Freud's Studies in Hysteria (1893). These, says Dr. Kupper, were followed by works involving concepts of resistance, transference and repression during the time when Freud was developing the same ideas and giving them wide currency.

Introspection & Intuition. Freud himself summed up this continuing similarity in his letter to Schnitzler: "I have gained the impression that you have learned through intuition--though actually as a result of sensitive introspection--everything that I have had to unearth by laborious work on other persons. I even believe that basically you are yourself a depth psychologist."

But Analyst Kupper suggests a question: If Poet Schnitzler was really a psychologist, was Psychologist Freud perhaps really a poet? For a long time before Freud, the soul had belonged in the domain of poets more than of physicians, who had increasingly concerned themselves with the physical being. Freud tried to subject the intangibles of the soul to the discipline of scientific materialism and determinism. And yet his insights may have been closer to the truths of poetry than to the truths of science.

-Or spiritual double, a concept that can be traced back to the ancient Egyptians, who believed that every man had a soul (ka) which was his exact double. Often in the portrait of a king there was a little man behind the king with the ruler's features and dress.

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