THE AVATAR IN PANAMA - Theses - Flinders University

1.1 Double, Double, Toil and Trouble The Avatar in Panamahistorians. 54 Freud too, subscribed to the view of the author longing for aplaying out of the artist’s unrealised aspirations:There are also all those unfulfilled but possiblefutures to which we still like to cling in phantasy,(sic) all those strivings of the ego which adverseexternal circumstances have crushed, and allour suppressed acts of volition which nourish inus the illusion of Free Will. 55Freud’s rationale that the sublimation of unsatisfied desire actsas the impetus for fantasy allows the conclusion that the emergence ofthe double in fiction is the result of the character’s frustrated fantasies.Each fantasy constructed by that individual, character or author,unwittingly contains the fulfilment of a wish. 56 The illusion of free willbecomes an ironic concept as the repressed act of volition may leadone to be at the behest of one’s own free will by creating fantasies as asubliminal outlet. This makes ‘free will’ effectively deterministic andenables an interminable and cyclical process of being dictated to bysuppressed desires fostering invisible forces by which so many literarycharacters feel pursued.Psychoanalytic theory seemed a new and most suitable meansof analysing these artistic and literary works, especially those of thefantastic variety. It was so particularly deft at interpreting and explainingaway what at first sight appeared to be completely absurd, that itbecame associated with feasible analyses of these types of texts. As aconsequence the creative process became inextricably linked withpsychoanalytic theory. 57 Freud viewed the hero or protagonist as arepresentation of the author’s ego or self. He noticed in what heconsidered psychological fiction that the hero was the only characterdescribed from within while other characters were observed fromwithout. This led Freud to believe the protagonist embodied the soul ofthe author. In effect, the hero becomes the writer’s double reflectingtrends in the writer’s psychic life as the materialisation andpersonification of conflicts. Therefore the production of literature itselfmight be interpreted as a double, or better yet, another life of theauthor. 58 The creation of the other life is a metaphor for the depiction of54 Harry Tucker, Jr. introduction, The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study, by Otto Rank(Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1971) xiii.55 Freud, “The Uncanny” 388.56Freud, “The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming”, Collected Papers 176.57 In keeping with this it is interesting to note Otto Rank’s use of literature instead ofclinical case studies upon which to base his study of the double.58 Freud, “The Poet and Day-Dreaming” 180.30