2. Doppelgangers

  　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 19^th 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）