If you met someone who exactly resembles
you or met yourself, you would turn white with fear and could say nothing. You
may have heard the word doppelganger.
Doppelganger means double walker in German.
From the above, doppelganger is used as
the word referring to the phenomenon that the third party see yourself at the
place where you were not, a man see another himself or the supernatural being
that is almost identical to a man living. And generally seeing own doppelganger is sign of his unfortunate
or death.
fig.1
It may be unbelievable that there is a lot of great man who met his doppelganger from ancient times. For
example, Aristotle saw his counterpart walking ahead of him. Goethe, age
twenty-one, passed himself wearing a gorgeous cloth on the road, eight years
later when he went down the same road he found that he wore the cloth that he
saw. So he met his future figure. Japanese writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa told he
saw his doppelganger and he was especially attracted the story about
doppelganger; Illness of Shadow, written in Edo Era. Many writers, such as Hoffmann,
Poe, Dostoevsky, Chamisso, Wild, Maupassant and Musset picked up this
phenomenon in their books. The noteworthy fact is that most of them were artists
having some kind of mental problems.
fig.2
In psychology, seeing alter
ego is called heautoscopy. Heautoscopy
is defined as the phenomenon that own mind is projected onto the outside. In psychosomatic
medicine, the first time when heautoscopy
was picked up is in 1488 by Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger. They told they
saw own alter ego lying by the side of him. However the systematic study
started after the 19th century. Heautoscopy
can appear not only mental patient but also ordinary person when he is tired or
he is going to sleep. Fear, sadness, sleepiness or strictly self-hate can cause
ordinary person to see their alter ego. Except for the occasion that heautoscopy appears to ordinary person, heautoscopy is caused by the factor such
as the influence of alcohol or some kind of drugs, a high fever, mental disease
or having an epileptic seizure. By the way we can give a dream as the thing
being similar to heautoscopy. We see
own appearance as if the man who can be seen original in a dream. And the
feeling that an infant first see himself in a mirror is said to resemble heautoscopy.
Because
heautoscopy resembles a type of pain
associated with an amputated limb, called phantom limb, we can give an
explanation heautoscopy with an idea
of body image. Each of us has an image of the whole body in their heart. It is
not mere perception but a pile of the sort of the perceptions and the image of spatial relationship between each of the parts. It is cold body image. So heautoscopy can be explained as the
result of the projectile from own body image by some kind of causes.
reference 泉鏡花 芸術と病理（吉村博任）
東西不思議物語（澁澤龍彦）
