(From the first 3 chapters of the book):

[A] question either of a physical double [], or of a likeness which has been detached from the ego and become an individual being (shadow, reflection, portrait.) [] the representationally opposite form of expression of the same psychic constellation: the representation, of one and the same person, of two distinct beings separated by amnesia. These cases of double-consciousness have also been observed clinically (Rank 20).

Apart from the figure of the double, that takes the form of various types, all these tales exhibit a series of coinciding motifs []. We always find a likeness which resembles the main character down to the smallest particulars, such as name, voice, and clothing a likeness, which, as though stolen from the mirror (Hoffmann), primarily appears to the main character as a reflection. Always, too, this double works at cross-purposes with its prototype; and, as a rule, the catastrophe occurs in the relationship with a woman, predominantly ending in suicide by the way of death intended for the irksome prosecutor. In a number of instances this situation is combined with a thoroughgoing persecutory delusion or is even replaced by it, thus assuming the picture of a total paranoiac system of delusions. Taking notice of these typical traits shared by a succession of writers is aimed not so much at proving their literary interdependence in some cases just as positive as it is impossible in others as at calling attention to the identical psychic structure of these authors, which we now intend to consider somewhat more closely (33).

[]The typically recurring basic ways in which these forms appear do not become intelligible from the writers individual personality. Indeed, to a certain degree they seem to be alien to it, inappropriate, and contrary to his way of otherwise viewing the world. These are the odd representations of the double as a shadow, mirror-image, or portrait, the meaningful evaluation of which we do not quite understand even though we can follow it emotionally. In the writer, as in his reader, a super-individual factor seems to be unconsciously vibrating here, lending to these motifs a mysterious psychic resonance. The purpose of the following section is to use ethnographic, folkloric, and mythological traditions to demonstrate the part played by ethnopsychology and to relate to it those individually revived features which have the same meaning. The section also intends to prepare us to notice the common psychological basis of the superstitious and artistic representation of these impulses (48).