Abstract: The doppelgänger tales make a significant subgenre in Poe’s fictional sphere, not only exemplifying a unique motif of gothic literature, but also overcoming by “the return of negation” the psychological inability of the unconscious to say “no.” In his studies of schizophrenia and animal behavior, Gregory Bateson, a British anthropologist, detected a sort of “transcontextual syndrome,” which may establish a coupling between morbid logic and artistic creativity, hence transforming the disorder of Bertrand Russell’s“logical types” into the “double bind” that usually controls patients of schizophrenia, and generating a logic of unique artistic creation -- the literal metaphoricalization. This article, by using the framework of Bateson’s “double bind theory” as a platform for my study, attempts to present a panoramic view of Poe’s doppelgänger tales and explore the genesis of the doppelgänger aesthetics in light of characters’ psychology and narrative structure. My conclusion is that the doppelgänger phenomenon not only exists in the interface between literary characters and their mirrored counterparts, but also displays itself in the narrative dynamics driven by a Bakhtinian dialogic nexus between overt plot and covert progression. On the one hand, it offers the “surface reading” school an effective case in point and, on the other, creates a perfect model of narratological interpretation for the “secret writing” that Poe had always promoted.

Key words: Edgar Allan Poe, Gregory Bateson, "double bind theory", doppelgänger tales