The doppelganger figure encodes life’s unrealized potential selves

Evidence

Freud speculated that the figure of the doppelganger recurs in the culture in part because the idea of there being duplicate selves stands in for the vast potentialities that our lives hold. We are the product of choices—made by us, and made by others. But, Freud wrote, those never are the only choices available. There are also “all the possibilities which, had they been realized, might have shaped our destiny, and to which our imagination still clings, all the strivings of the ego that were frustrated by adverse circumstances, all the suppressed acts of volition that fostered the illusion of free will.” — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 1095

Categorization

• DEFINE: Freud’s theory frames the doppelganger as standing in for foreclosed possibilities — a crucial definitional move in Klein’s argument.
• XREF: This reading echoes the road-not-taken motif in The Namesake and multiverse fiction generally. — connects to: The Other’s look makes the self haunt an unreflective consciousness — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 727