The Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank, who collaborated closely and later broke with Freud, saw the soul—the self believed to live beyond the body after death—as the original doppelganger, the most intimate of doubles. The choice to believe in a soul, he wrote, was “a wish defense against a dreaded eternal destruction.” Freud concurred, writing, “The double was originally an insurance against the extinction of the self … ‘an energetic denial of the power of death’, and it seems likely that the ‘immortal’ soul was the first double of the body.”
