With the eyes of the mind

Faguet, Robert A.

doi:10.1016/0163-8343(79)90006-9

Cited by 10 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 7 publications

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“…In total, out of over 140 reviewed case studies, we included only 9 which satisfied the functional criteria of heautoscopy (see Table 1 for collated information on etiology, symptoms, and extensive first-person reports). Nu-308 DOI: 10.1159/000526869 merous articles were identified as mislabeling much more common autoscopy or out-of-body experience as heautoscopy and were therefore discarded from the review [25,[31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][49][50][51][52][53][54][55] (i.e., no abnormal, ambiguous self-location and no expanded body ownership was reported). Although both heautoscopy and autoscopy overlap over a striking symptom of hallucinating "the double," it is only the patients with heautoscopy that report the actual changes in body ownership or self-location (an example from a purely autoscopic case reported by Lippman's, when the clinician asked, "Well, then, are there two of 'you'?…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Splitting the Unity of Bodily Self: Toward a Comprehensive Review of Phenomenology and Psychopathology of Heautoscopy

Szczotka¹,

Wierzchoń²

2022

Psychopathology

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Background: Heautoscopy refers to a pathological experience of visual reduplication of one’s body with an ambiguous sense of self-location and a disturbing sensation of owning the illusory body. It has been recognized to occur in the course of strikingly diverse psychiatric and neurological disorders, such as schizophrenia, space-occupying lesions, frequently of the temporal or parietal lobes, migraine, epilepsy, and depression. The literature on the subject suffers from numerous conceptual inconsistencies, scarcity of clinical data, and a lack of theoretical integratory framework that could explain the uniqueness of these symptoms. Aims: In the study, we aimed to review all case reports on heautoscopy we could cull from the literature with an attempt to extract common factors and to foster a theoretical synthesis. Methods: All medical and psychological databases were rigorously searched, along with reference lists of the preselected articles. First-person reports were classified according to aspects of bodily self-consciousness primarily affected: body ownership, self-location, sense of agency and consequently, collated with their etiological backgrounds. Results: Out of over 140 case studies, a total of only 9 patients with heautoscopy were selected as satisfying functional criteria, carefully distinguishing heautoscopy from other typically conflated full-body anomalies: autoscopy, out-of-body experience, or feeling of presence. Numerous cases turned out to be mislabeling autoscopy or out-of-body experience as heautoscopy. In addition, several problems with existing neuroimaging experiments were identified. Conclusion: Phenomenological analysis revealed that from the patients’ perspective, heautoscopy resembles a somatesthetic-proprioceptive illusion, rather than a cognitive delusion, and occurs much less frequently than reported. A most peculiar symptom, described by some as a sense of “bilocation,” appears to stem from dynamic shifts in self-location and expanded body ownership, rather than an expanded first-person perspective. Although extremely rare in its pure form, heautoscopy gives a unique opportunity to explore the brain limits to the plasticity of bodily boundaries and the origin of the first-person spatial perspective.

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