THE AVATAR IN PANAMA - Theses - Flinders University

3.3 Reinventing the Double The Avatar in Panamamemory trigger, which coincidentally has a history of contributing to theconjuring of the double. 18 What this says about Jaramillo Levi'scharacterisation is that it is remarkably developed, which is unusual forthe length of the stories presented in Duplicaciones. His protagonistsare well-rounded and three dimensional enough to be affected by suchsensitive and personal gestures and experiences.Metamorphosis and Mutation: A Change for the Better?The intextricable connection between psychology and alterationguarantees that metamorphoses manifest in a myriad of ways. Thefundamental concepts upon which psychoanalysis is based are those ofrepression and the unconscious. Repression is linked to variouspreviously mentioned defence mechanisms that the individual employsto attempt to maintain psychological stability. 19 One of thosemechanisms is the redirection toward one’s self of an otherwiseoutward aggressive impulse. 20 The resulting guilt following thisaggression against the object of hatred, in this case the self, is avoidedor at least counteracted by creating double or multiple selves. 21Doubling is therefore a sub-category of metamorphosis. Individualsexperience themselves as dissociated into distinct personalities withdifferent degrees of memory of what occurs when other personalitystates emerge. This is known as asymmetrical amnesia (127).Frequently people in dissociative states “lose themselves” and thisnotion figures in descriptions of metamorphosing characters. Clearly,dissociation is associated with the issue of self. Metamorphosis andtransformation also provoke questions about selfhood, identity and what18 This appears in both the works of Cortázar and Poe. In Cortázar’s “Lejana”: “Sedoblegará si realmente soy yo, se sumará a mi zona iluminada, más bella y cierta, consólo ir a su lado y apoyarle una mano en el hombro” (436); In Poe’s “Ligeia”, thenarrator is addicted to opium and wishes to resurrect and revivify his first wife. He wasnever aware of her entering his study, “as she placed her marble hand upon myshoulder” (654). In “House of Usher” the protagonist undergoes physical changes, a“strange alteration”: “But, as I placed my hand upon his shoulder, there came a strongshudder over his whole person” (244). See Appendix C Mano sobre el hombro.19 See 1.1 footnote 15, 17.20 “Often the unconscious mind tries to deny its unconscious through the mechanismof ‘projection’, attributing its own unconscious content (a murderous impulse, forexample) to a real person in the world outside; at times it even creates an externalhallucination in the image of this content”. Keppler 5.21 Jerome L. Singer, ed. Repression and Dissociation: Implications for PersonalityTheory, Psychopathology, and Health (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990) 82.230