Autoscopic Phenomena

Have you ever seen your own face in a flash-like vision, as if glancing into a suddenly exposed mirror—with the sole difference that there was no reflecting surface in the vicinity? Have you ever bumped into a figure, whom you first thought to be a stranger but who gradually made himself recognized, by an eery feeling of psychological affinity, as nobody else than yourself, your “second self,” or doppelgänger? Have you ever felt separated from your own body, perhaps hovering a few meters above, looking down onto the body as if it were an empty shell you had just hatched from? As different as these scenarios may appear, they depict experiences subsumed under the heading of autoscopic phenomena. Autoscopic phenomena form a heterogenous class of reduplicative experiences of one's own body and self. Literally, autoscopy means “seeing oneself,” but an autoscopic experience commonly involves far more than the visual senses.

This entry describes the classification of autoscopic phenomena as currently accepted in medical and psychological literature. Based on phenomenology, this classification allows a rough interpretation of the different types of autoscopic experiences in terms of underlying cerebral mechanisms. The focus is then directed on the core type of autoscopic experiences, heautoscopy, which is the encounter of a person with a phantom double (i.e., doppelgänger) of herself. This multisensory, psychologically meaningful, and emotionally stirring experience has received much attention in anthropological and ethnological studies and in creative fiction as the “motif of the double.” The often profound symbolism contained in folkloristic and belletristic accounts of heautoscopy is also found in clinical case reports and provides a challenge to a view of autoscopic phenomena that is solely based on neuropsychological mechanisms. Integrating formal aspects of an autoscopic episode and its symbolic content requires one to transcend current-day cognitive neurology. The study of autoscopic phenomena may thus contribute in important ways to bridging the gaps between neuroscientific views of body and self and the philosophy of the mind.