The Metapsychology of Autoscopic Phenomena

An autoscopic phenomenon is the encountering of an image of oneself. The image may be an hallucination; it may be an illusion, as when one takes a mirror image to be a person; or it may be a vivid fantasy. Most autoscopic phenomena, as the term implies, are primarily visual, but often other sensory modalities participate: the image may speak, or it may touch the subject.

Autoscopic hallucinations occur in cases of brain damage, particularly when a portion of the lesion falls into the parieto-temporo-occipital area. They may form a part of a psychic seizure, or they may occur separately (1). They have been described in cases of structural and non-organic disease of different kinds, especially frequently with migraine and epilepsy (5), (16), but they have also been reported autobiographically by a number of normal, in fact distinguished individuals as well, for example, Archbishop Frederic (E. J. Lloyd) (5) and the physicist, Ernst Mach. Freud, too, has described his experience of an autoscopic illusion (2, p. 248).

The idea that an individual has a 'double' has been a fascinating one, and the 'double' is a favourite theme of writers who attempt to create weird and uncanny effects. Freud deals with the subject in his paper on 'The Uncanny'. He first briefly reviews Rank's observations and suggestions. Rank wrote that the concept of the double is an attempt to insure against the death of the individual, much as a multiplicity of limbs acts to deny castration. 'Doubling' is a manifestation of primary narcissism, though subsequently, in adult life, the double appears as a harbinger of death. Freud adds that not only may the image of the body, which resides in the ego, be split and reduplicated, but splitting of the ego may constitute a normal aspect of development, that is, creation of the superego by detachment of a part of self-observation and ego ideal. However the unsettling effect of the doubling phenomenon is probably to be ascribed to the fact that it is