Book: Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World
Author: Naomi Klein
Reviewed by: Michael Manely, family law attorney at The Manely Firm P.C.
Naomi Klein has synthesized and collated many of the ills of the world in this one, intensively thought-out, mind-bending read. Basing her exploration on her experience being mistaken online for a person with the same name and wildly different views, she covers the deep, deep psychology of doppelgangers — alternate selves — which, it seems, impact every aspect of our modern life.
Klein examines how our upside-down world is revealing caricatures of our collective personalities, largely through the digital doubles we’ve created with our closely curated online presence.
She writes, “…this is the form of doppelganger that increasingly preoccupies me: the fascist clown state that is the ever-present twin of liberal Western democracies, perpetually threatening to engulf us in its fires of selective belonging and ferocious despising.”
She researches the topic of doppelgangers in history, psychology and popular culture, bringing other great thinkers to bear in her social critique:
“In the books and films about doppelgangers that had come to fill my evenings, I was struck by how reliably this phenomenon occurred; eventually, the double replaces the original, through sheer energy and tenacity, while the original fades away or worse…”
“Did I need to start screaming more in order not to be deprived of my own identity? Probably. To prove to others – and to myself – that I do indeed exist, I needed to give the machine fresh content: new takes, new rage, new intimacy.”
From online personas to political appropriation from progressive to populist ends, Klein identifies how these phenomena are interconnected, how one does not exist without the other, and how one actually prompts and sustains the other, almost always to wicked ends.
Klein writes that Otto Rank, who worked with Sigmund Freud, “saw the souls — the self believed to live beyond the body after death — as the original doppelganger…The choice to believe in a soul, he wrote, was a ‘wish defense against a dreaded eternal destruction.’ Freud concurred… the ‘immortal soul was the first double of the body.’… It is often accompanied by the creation of another kind of double – an evil twin, or abject self – onto which all our sins and wrongdoings are projected….”
The creation of the abject self body double, this schism in the psyche, warps consciousness. It is the dark yin and yang of existence.
“And what happens to their abject selves while they are busily performing their perfected selves? What evil twins get created in this partitioning.”
By our individual and societal creation of our doppelgangers, by operating separate selves, we cause the schism which creates not only the space for hypocrisy but also the balance to sustain that separate self. We paint pictures of our own Dorian Gray.
To read a comprehensive, different take on how we got to where we now find ourselves and what we can creatively do about it, you must read this book.
Editor’s notes: Global Atlanta will receive a 10 percent commission on any purchase of this book through the links on this page.
Each year, Global Atlanta asks influential readers and community leaders to review the most impactful book they read during the course of the year. This endeavor has continued annually since 2010.
See last year’s full list of books on Bookshop here and see Global Atlanta’s full store, featuring Reader Picks lists going back to 2013 along with lists of books we’ve covered through stories or author talks.
All books were chosen and reviews written independently, with only mild editing from our staff.