La búsqueda de la identidad. Imaginación, libertad y compromiso

Abstract

This essay is a brief historical review of the concepts of the “double”, the “other”, the “alter ego”. The metaphorical search for identity spreads out through dreams, imagination and creativity. Jean-Paul Richter, Gérard de Nerval, Goethe, Arthur Rimbaud, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Rainer Maria Rilke and the french surrealists are some of the authors studied. They contribute to the development of a new conception of the world and of the human being, asserting at each step the power of freedom and action and, at the same time, responsibility, devotion and engagement. Everything implies negation and its double: love and betrayal, ingenuity and grotesqueness, fantasy and pain, sublimity and evil. A universe of echoes and reflections, where one plays with the most secret intimacy. The interior world is a labyrinth and the labyrinth a looking glass.