Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

135fear of death and creates strong tendencies toward self-punishment, which also implysuicide. (76-77)According to Rank, the split is occasioned by the dual direction of aggression: outward, towardthat which is projected onto the double, and inward, toward the annihilation of the ego and thedeath drive. It is clear in Rank’s The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study and Freud’s “TheUncanny” that the origins of splitting (doubling) are located in the narcissistic features of thesubject. Robert K. Martin argues that narcissism is not what the character was, but rather what itbecomes (73). I want to build upon Martin’s argument by suggesting that becoming is a processthat is followed by splitting and doubling. Splitting the ego, the double, in its defensive forms,has an obsessive return to narcissism that produces another dualitydesire and death. Again, theconnection between desire and death, between writing and death is illuminating.If we follow Rank’s argument that the ego’s consciousness of guilt drives him to placethat responsibility on another alter ago, another double that is either described as the devil or thedevil’s incarnation (double), then we accept the argument that Ahab’s behavior is driven by afascination with and a fear of the double. In other words, the oscillation between fear and desire isgiven form and figure through the figure of the double which arises from the tension betweenunity and division. In fact, the double, a fictional motif, puts under erasure the traditional conceptof unity of character, time, and space, introducing a novel approach to things and beings based onmultidimensionality and the co-existence of and tension between opposites and doubles. Thisability of the double to disrupt the order is eloquently explained by Rank in his “The Double asImmortal Self”:In confronting those ancient conceptions of the dual soul with its modernmanifestation in the literature of the double, we realize a decisive change of