THE STORY: “William Wilson”

Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson” etches the rudiments of psychoanalysis sixty years before Freud’s THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS. A schoolboy’s doppelganger goads him, shadows him, and torments him. Memories of the womb in a Lacanian nightmare make this uncanny tale the progenitor of works ranging from Thomas Tyron’s THE OTHER to Brian DePalma’s SISTERS and Cronenberg’s DEAD RINGERS.