Freud speculated that the figure of the doppelganger recurs in the culture in part because the idea of there being duplicate selves stands in for the vast potentialities that our lives hold. We are the product of choices—made by us, and made by others. But, Freud wrote, those never are the only choices available. There are also “all the possibilities which, had they been realized, might have shaped our destiny, and to which our imagination still clings, all the strivings of the ego that were frustrated by adverse circumstances, all the suppressed acts of volition that fostered the illusion of free will.”

XREF: Connects to the reader's thinking about identity, selfhood, and alternate-life narratives — the same theme explored in fiction about parallel timelines and multiverses. FICTION: Strong prompt for a story where a character encounters their double as a mirror of the life paths they abandoned.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 1095