Autoscopic in psychiatry are called visual hallucinations, in which a person sees himself. Most often this happens with patients of specialized psychiatric clinics, but under some conditions it is also observed in mentally healthy people.
Here is how phantomologists write off the features of a person's perception of his double:
“More often than not, a double appears without warning. He looks like a mirror image of the original, positioned out of the reach of his hands and facing him. The size of the double is the same as the original, but very often only the face or head and torso are visible.
Usually, details are clearly visible, but colors differ poorly: they are either dull or absent altogether. The shape is usually transparent. In other cases, it looks jelly-like or as if reflected in the glass. Quite often the double imitates the movements of the original, the expression of his face - as if the original is looking in a mirror."
In psychiatry, cases of seeing doubles are also described, which repeat all the patient's movements. By the way, G. Heine's poem "The Double" is a poetic depiction of the experiences of this kind of healthy people. In the "Double" FM Dostoevsky reflects the hallucinatory experiences of the mentally ill.
The book "General Psychopathology", a textbook for students of medical institutes, written by a team of authors headed by the famous psychiatrist VM Banshchikov, contains one extremely important indication: autoscopic hallucinations often accompany severe forms of cerebral pathology!
The authors note further - is not this circumstance connected with the belief that a person who saw his double dies? Indeed, in a number of stories with doubles, the originals, before seeing them, were seriously ill.
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A classic example of the latter is the story of Maupassant. This is a purely clinical case. In 1885, the writer worked on the manuscript of the story "Orlya". Orlya is a kind of invisible creature who settled with the hero of the story and caused a lot of trouble, something like a poltergeist. Quite unexpectedly, a figure appeared at the door, walked across the room and sat down opposite. And then she began to dictate the continuation of the story!
The writer was surprised to the extreme. How was this person able to get to him? How does he know the very words that the writer was just about to write? Who is this person? But soon Maupassant realized that the one sitting opposite was not a stranger, but his own double. The figure quickly disappeared, but what happened deeply shocked the writer. The doppelganger was the first warning of an illness that caught him by surprise, leading to madness and death.
Apparently, in most cases, when the original sees his ghostly double alone with himself, that is, in the absence of witnesses (sometimes the witnesses do not notice anything), we are dealing with the most banal autoscopic hallucination. VA Zhukovsky approached this explanation in the middle of the 19th century in connection with the analysis of the "Berkovich case".
This incident has been cited more than once as an example, as the great poet wrote about doubles, but the explanation given by him was omitted as contradicting such a statement. Let's get acquainted with the "Berkovich case" without cuts. Here is what the poet wrote about him and in connection with him in the article "Something about ghosts":
“If dreams were not so ordinary, if very few could have them, and they are very rare, then dreams would seem incredible to us, for there is something in them that is contrary to the natural order. There are waking dreams that come very close to what we have called a ghost.
Sometimes the eyes have not yet closed, all the objects around us are still visible to us, and already the dream has taken possession of us and already in the dream, into which we have passed insensitively, something completely different from the state in which we were in a minute occurs before us. something strange, always more or less terrifying; and if we wake up without noticing our rapid transition from vigil to sleep and vice versa, then we can easily remain with the thought that something unnatural has happened to us.
Here is an example: the late A. M. Druzhinin, who was, I think, the chief director of schools in Moscow, told me the following remarkable incident.
I was, as he said, briefly acquainted with Dr. Berkovich. One day, it was in winter, he invited me along with Mrs. Peretz to his place for an evening; we had a very cheerful evening, and the host himself was especially cheerful.
Ten o'clock struck; Berkovich's wife told him: “Go and see if the table is being set? Dinner time". The door from the living room led directly into the dining room. Berkovich went out and returned a minute later. "How soon?" - asked the wife. He nodded his head silently.
I looked at him and saw that he was as pale as a sheet; His gaiety was gone, and for the rest of the evening he hardly said a word. We sat down at the table and had supper. Mrs. Peretz got ready to go to her place, and Berkovich went to see off his guest from the porch. Putting her in the carriage, he was kicked into the snow, which lay in snowdrifts around the entrance (there was a cruel blizzard all day); it is very likely that at that moment he caught a cold.
The next day they came to tell me that Berkovich was in bed and that he was calling me to his place; I wanted to visit him myself, for I was disturbed by the sad gloom that I had noticed in him the day before.
And this is what he answered me when I asked him about her reason: “I will soon die, I saw my death with my own eyes. When yesterday I left the living room and into the dining room to see if dinner was coming soon, I saw that the table was set, that there was a coffin on the table surrounded by candles, and that I myself was lying in the coffin. Be sure that you will bury me soon."
Indeed, Berkovich died a short time later.
And here is the explanation of the case, given by Zhukovsky himself:
“It is very likely that in his body there was already an embryo of illness, a cold developed illness, and illness, with the help of the imagination, frightened by a ghost, produced death. But what was this ghost? A waking dream, a vision of an insignificant image, is the same as happens when a dream expresses either an anxious state of our soul, or a painful disorder of our body.
Here there was nothing more than a dream in the waking state, arising from the same cause which for the most part produces every other dream; here the vision is not separated from the seer, a vision without an object; there is still no ghost in the sense in which we have defined it, although there is something extraordinary in the event itself, which does not belong to the natural order."
Somewhat later, V. A. Zhukovsky, the writer and journalist V. V. Bitner, in his book "Into the Mysterious Region" (St. Petersburg, 1907), made an even more definite conclusion regarding the phenomenon of twins:
“Having cited the described three cases (the phenomenon of twins), we must again repeat that they can only be attributed to the field of prophetic visions only by misunderstanding, since similar phenomena occur, albeit rarely, with people who have been living well after that for decades, and sometimes such bifurcations of our bodily image are repeated several times with the same face.
Of course, this phenomenon, which we will not consider here, is abnormal and indicates a serious illness of the whole organism, indicating a deep disorder of the nervous system; therefore, if it happens to someone, in most cases it happens shortly before his death or even at the very moment of transition to another world.
Thus, the appearance of a double can only serve as, so to speak, an ominous diagnostic sign, but there is, of course, nothing prophetic in it, just as the appearance of a white plaque on the tongue cannot be considered prophetic in most diseases, various skin rashes, an increase in body temperature, etc...
And yet, and still … It's not for nothing that V. A. Zhukovsky remarked: "… there is in the event itself something extraordinary, which does not belong to the natural order."