I tried to Google on this with no conclusive results. While in a high school human behavior course, I know we learned of one of the big names in psychiatry hypothesizing “The Stranger”, but I forget who’s theory this was. I figure someone on the SD may recall. (FYI: This is not homework, just trying to recall something from another life. HS was a loooooong time ago.)
Are you thinking of Carl Jung and his theory of archetypes? Wolfgang Pauli and Jung, in a series of letters to each other, analyzed some recurring dreams that Pauli had, and a figure that Pauli described as “the Stranger” kept appearing in them.
No, I am confident it was not an architype. “The Stranger” psyche, as I recall, was a way of describing the inner us we don’t really show. While it may best be described in Billy Joel’s song of this title, I am certain it is a personality type in all of us. And, IIRC, it is often to blame when a person goes wacko and all the neighbors say “but he was such a nice guy”.
If by psychiatry you mean philosophy, then it might be Albert Camus
Yes, based on the OP I had no idea that you were talking about the Billy Joel song – I assumed it was the classic novel by Camus. Especially since you mention being in high school a long time ago.
http://psikoloji.fisek.com.tr/jung/shadow.htm
“A gentle and reasonable being can be transformed into a maniac or a savage beast. One is always inclined to lay the blame on external circumstances, but nothing could explode in us if it had not been there. As a matter of fact, we are constantly living on the edge of a volcano, and there is, so far as we know, no way of protecting ourselves from a possible outburst that will destroy everybody within reach.”
“Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. Furthermore, it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected.”
“The ‘other’ may be just as one-sided in one way as the ego is in another. And yet the conflict between them may give rise to truth and meaning-but only if the ego is willing to grant the other its rightful personality.”