Double or Nothing

This essay is part of an e-flux Notes series called The Contemporary Clinic, where psychoanalysts from around the world are asked to comment on the kinds of symptoms and therapeutic challenges that present themselves in their practices. What are the pathologies of today’s clinic? How are these intertwined with politics, economy, and culture? And how is psychoanalysis reacting to the new circumstances?

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In a dream, I ran into a friend on the street. He posed a question to me: “What would you do if you met your double?” Before I could answer, he offered three choices: “You could kill it, friend it, and then there’s fashion.”

You are never supposed to meet your double. The double is always supposed to be held back elsewhere, as a portrait in an attic, in a closet, as another personality that cannot overlap with the first. Meeting the double is evidence that the space of the subject has been collapsed, not because two subjects cannot occupy the same place but because one subject cannot occupy the same place; the sight of the double signals that the interval between the place of the subject and its specular image, between here and there, has closed.

Meeting the double is a particular genre of the fantasy of coincidence, in which appearance and being align. To meet it, as if on the street, is a situation which can never arrive in full. Yet the encounter with your double is both impossible and has already been lived in fantasy by way of mirror, shadow, twin, and rival, and as the catastrophic experience of feeling replaced in what had previously seemed a singular place by any number of siblings, lovers, colleagues, and friends.

Freud writes that the phenomenon of the double “appears in every shape and every degree of development.”1 He leans on the work of Otto Rank, who suggests that the immortal soul was the first double of the body. The double is a measure against extinction, and Freud finds a correspondence to this in dreams, where castration is represented as a multiplication of the genital symbol. At a moment of loss, we double up. Freud attempts to theorize why the double should go from an assurance of immortality to an uncanny harbinger of death. He suggests that the initial doubling springs from a self-love associated with primary narcissism, and that this is a developmental stage that, when overcome, appears uncanny because of its status as old and repressed.

This finds the uncanniness of the double in relation to time, but it can also be thought about as a problem of place. The coincidence of the doubles is the threat of death: that they should be in the same place, on the same level, able to meet on the street. This forces the question of origination: Who is the original? One must be killed. Dying, then, is also a return to singularity, something that no one else can do for you. The Lacanian subject is a space of disjunction, noncoincidence, and suspension. It is the interval between two positions. If the double is held back elsewhere, as a kind of backup, the distance between appearance and being is maintained. The double ironically is meant to back up the subject’s singularity. But in a Deleuzian sense, the double and the soul do not belong to the domain of generalities, which involve equivalences and therefore have entities which are substitutable for one another. The double is a repetition, and repetition is strictly the repetition of singularities. This means what is uncanny about meeting the double is not that you could be replaced but that you can’t be—a misrecognition of orders ushers in the meeting of a fantasy of replacement with the categorical impossibility of exchange. 

Françoise Dolto, who influenced a generation of French parents, insisted that when the infant looks in the mirror, the accompanying adult must describe the reflected image by saying, “That’s your image in the mirror” and not, “That’s you.”2 Social media culture conspicuously erodes this distinction, and the space for the subject becomes crowded out by an endless curation of one’s own image and the taunting specular images of the other having it, enjoying it, being it, and seemingly not even paying for it. This can immensely cloud the analytic concern of establishing a place from which to speak. These platforms are often associated with powerful experiences of jealousy (Lacan would call it jalouissance, combining the French jalousie or “jealousy” and jouissance or “enjoyment”), which then spur a sense of moral failure and self-reproach. A common-sense wisdom rushes in to diagnose the problem and propose a solution: It must be that my attitude of envy toward the rival tells me something about my desire, that I want a trait, experience, situation, or possession that they have and must cultivate it in myself in order to alleviate this terrible feeling. While this makes sense as conscious reasoning—you have something, I want it, I should get it, and then I won’t want to kill you anymore—it’s a bit of wishful thinking. Envy is parlayed into aspiration, and we start to believe we can work our way out of this immortal split with the double by “living our best lives” and increasing our own social “value.” It assumes that envy begins and ends with wanting what another has.

On the contrary, it’s not that there are defined others out there and I want what they have in order to be more like them, but that the other becomes a rival because I cannot coincide with myself—there is an internal limit or split which returns from without. In other words, rivalry is already internal to the subject’s relation to its own image, which it encounters outside of itself. The rival is, following Deleuze, a decentering of difference, a displacing and disguising of repetition. In this sense it’s all too easy to blame social media for our contemporary double troubles. Hatred of the double, as a condensation evidencing death, limit, lack, and difference, is coeval with civilization. The hatred is in proportion to the self-love from which the double mythically sprung.

The contemporary clinic, like the historical clinic, can act as a third that’s irreducible to the duel/dual relation of the double. In What is Madness? Darian Leader relates a vignette of a patient who had trouble leaving his home because of an omnipresent, persecutory gaze. During his analysis, he began to walk through department stores, monitoring the scope of the security cameras. When he found the cameras’ blind spots, he would shoplift items from that place. This was an important development in his analysis.3 In establishing this place of concealment, he introduced a kind of absence into the horror vacui of the imaginary, a fort-da in which he can appear and disappear from the Other’s field of vision. Anatomically, the blind spot at the back of the eye is what allows one to see in the first place, and the department store blind spot introduced the fact of the unseeable into what had been a totalizing gaze. In his petty thefts, his minor double-crossings, he evades two economies of the department store: visual and financial. Not everything can be accounted for, exchanged, or made symmetrical.

The analyst sits behind, hoping to hold open the space of the patient’s blind spot, aspiring to the background. Analysis is both a stage and an offstage—another Schauplatz (“scene” or “setting”), as Freud famously called it. This (off)stage is a ground and a model for fashioning other (off)stages, like Leader’s patient who finds a creative way to subtract himself from the gaze. It’s no secret that the demand for transparency can beget rampant paranoia, and each analysis has to design its own rent in the absolute. Without an offstage, having becomes conflated with displaying. We often feel that to have something is to show it—to compete with rivals who are making visible what they have—and that this will provide a sense of having in ourselves. In analysis, we may come to discover that a feeling of having or not having may be unlinked from displays of having. Offering more to the non-lacking Other of the algorithm doesn’t seem to shore up a sense of identity.

If social media shows us anything, it’s that we all doubt we exist. We look to the Other as a guarantor, but in a classic superego bind, the more we appeal and sacrifice, the harsher the Other becomes. The most devout also feel the most guilty. The envy, which is felt as destructive, leads to more guilt and attempts at reparation. I’m skeptical of the idea that envy reveals what we want in any tangible sense. On the contrary, the scene of rivalry is useful because the rival provides an alibi for structural lack. Envy is the attitude that arises out of a scene in which constitutive lack is misrecognized as contingent loss, as if something is stolen: a double take in which you see the double taking. This apparently contingent theft is itself structural—the accident of destiny that repetition revolves around.

Envy props up an ideal. For Melanie Klein, who famously placed envy and gratitude together as a pair of opposites, envy is always in relation to an ideal of the good breast, inexhaustible and able to provide bountiful satisfaction. This ideal is exaggerated in proportion to persecutory fear; the goodness is built up to safeguard against the bad breast, the good breast’s evil twin. And this is also necessary to some degree. But analysis, in part due to the personality of its maker, aims to disillusion, to dull ideals of some of their shine. An ideal is a cruel and precarious shelter. It may provide some relief from the elements, but it also creates a situation in which one is always trying to bring two levels together, to align the reality with the ideal image and heal the split, closing the space of the subject. In this sense, the wish for coincidence and self-consistency is a kind of death drive.

In Joan Copjec’s brilliant 1994 book, Read My Desire, she argues that Foucauldian historicism effaces “the pockets of empty,” the structural gaps that register negatively in speech and in the social, serving as evidence that social reality is not a closed, all-encompassing totality. Copjec continues: “Disregarding desire, one constructs a reality that is realtight, that is no longer self external.”4 Perhaps we can include the culture that’s developed around social media as one of the newest attempts to disregard desire, to close the offstage of the unconscious by way of a parade of realtight others. Since the double of the unconscious can’t be eliminated, it just erupts elsewhere, under a kind of hypnosis, in the form of emergency and crisis. Envy as an effect of this situation is deceptive, and is often misrecognized as a problem of difference: If everyone had or were exactly the same, there would be no more envy. But the double shows that identicality doesn’t resolve but actually catastrophizes the problem of the other. To “double down” is to increase investment in a position even as and precisely because it becomes more untenable.

For a sensational example of doubling down on nonseparation, effectively redoubling anxiety, see Lucy and Anna DeCinque on TLC’s Extreme Sisters. Anna and Lucy, who identify as “the world’s most identical twins,” consider themselves to be one person. “We need to be the same,” they recite in unison. “We get high anxiety if we’re ever apart.”5 When one twin needs to have an infected tooth removed, they seek a dentist willing to remove a corresponding healthy tooth in the other twin. Difference is treated as synonymous with separation, and the world becomes a minefield of anxiogenic disparities, bringing to mind the Lacanian reversal of separation anxiety as a wish to separate. And yet each obstacle to total sameness is also a chance for them to overcome a challenge together, bringing them ever closer.

My dream dialogue about the double seemed to be a kind of parable of an analytic treatment, which involves the fantasy of coinciding with oneself as an other in the consulting room. This can only happen by way of chance, as a kind of “running into.” This is not a true meeting but the coincidence of noncoincidence, the accident of any number of parapraxes, in which the unconscious has its moment in the sun. Freud speaks about a doubling of consciousness as early as Studies in Hysteria, the splitting in two evidenced by hypnoid states. A dream itself is an artifact of double conscience. Dreams are always ironic in relation to authorship: the ultimate compositions for which we categorically disavow our authorial position. Even when we wake, we can’t identify with the place of the author—“What does this mean?” We offer it to the analyst in the hope that in reading it she will know something about it, annotate it, mark it up—this unsettling thing that is a confrontation with our twoness.

If we can’t eliminate or befriend the double, we can only hold open an elsewhere for it to be. “And then there’s fashion.” The three solutions seem to recapitulate the three registers of being, having, and appearing. Fashion certainly doesn’t offer a way out of the unstable plenum of the visual; arguably, it doubles down on envy, mimesis, spectacle. But it can also make something that weakens the imaginary, often by way of minimal difference, even as it represents it. Fashion is not only visual but tactile and textile, a text you style and wear. Often we come into analysis because we’re fatefully entangled in a text that long precedes us but seems to be catching up. We may feel compelled to bring the text about, even as we experience it as our worst fear. But that’s your text. That’s your dream. That’s your alibi. That’s not you.