In 1922 Sigmund Freud wrote to fellow Viennese author and dramatist Arthur Schnitzler: ‘I believe I have avoided you out of a sort of fear of my double’. Through a series of reflections on this imagined doubling and its reception, this paper demonstrates that the ambivalent desire for his literary other attested by Freud's confession goes to the heart of both theoretical and historical questions regarding the nature of psychoanalysis. Bringing Schnitzler's resistance to Freud into conversation with attempts by psychoanalytically oriented literary scholars to affirm the Doppengängertum of the two men, it argues that not only psychoanalytic theories and modernist literature but also the tendency to identify the two must be treated as historical phenomena. Furthermore, the paper contends, Schnitzler's work stands in a more critical relationship to its Viennese milieu than Freud's: his examination of the vicissitudes of feminine desire in ‘Fräulein Else’ underlines the importance of what lies outside the oedipal narrative through which the case study of ‘Dora’ comes to be centered on the uncanny nexus of identification with and anxious flight from the other.
Studies in Arthur Schnitzler
