José Cueli: Wars and the Double

F

Reud tells us about the double:

“We are thus faced, first of all, with the theme of the double—or the other self—in all its variations and developments; that is, with the appearance of persons who, because of their appearance, must equally be considered identical, with the intensification of this relationship through the transmission of psychic processes from one person to their double—what we would call telepathy—so that one participates in what the other knows, thinks, and experiences; with the identification of one person with another, such that they lose control over their own ego and replace their own with the other's ego; that is, a splitting of the ego, a participation in the ego, a substitution of the ego; finally, with the constant return of similarities, with the repetition of the same facial features, characters, destinies, criminal acts, even the same names in successive generations.”

The double does not disappear with primary protonarcissism, but rather acquires new contents in the later stages of the ego, as we will point out later.

“The sinister character can only be due to the fact that the –double– is a formation belonging to primitive and surpassed psychic epochs, in which it undoubtedly had a less hostile meaning.”

The double has been transformed into a scarecrow, just as gods become demons once their religions fall.

Déjà vu, Freud writes: The uncanny is not really anything new, but rather something that has always been familiar to psychic life and that only became strange through the process of its repression. And this connection, according to which the uncanny is something that, having been hidden, has become manifest. The uncanny is that sort of fright that affects things that are known and familiar .

Both definitions of the uncanny are investigated in relation to the phenomenon of the double, castration anxiety, the compulsion to repeat, the omnipotence of thought, and the return of the repressed. I emphasize these points because they frequently appear in the analysis of patients with psychological trauma.

To continue with last week's writing, perhaps death refers, in some way, to that double Freudian founding judgment in the simultaneity of attribution and nonexistence, in a crazed specular game between omnipotence and original helplessness, between hallucination and reality, in the incessant search to reach that original thing that was lost, in that veiled game of displacements of that primordial object towards the surrogates in external reality, the fateful and tragic becoming of existence in which we travel as beings marked by contradiction in a scenario with a double bottom, always carrying with us the ghostly sliding them along the margins, in the disquiet of being and not being.

Finally, the only certainty seems to be that death is lurking around us, hiding where it has nowhere else, and we call it: the wars we are experiencing.