There is, of course, no alternative but to start the first German Knight Science Journalism Tracker post with an article mentioning the most famous German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It is well known (at least outside of the “To-be-or-not-to-be-”-World of Shakespeare), that in his autobiography “Out of my Life. Fiction and Truth” Goethe describes a scene, where he rides away from the Alsace town Sesenheim in 1771, abandoning his beloved girlfriend Friederike. In this highly emotional state he sees a horsemen coming nearer and suddenly realizes, that the person is an older, well-off version of himself. The rider vanishes shortly after. But visiting eight years later, he writes, Goethe found himself taking the same route and wearing the same clothes as the “ghostly Goethe” he saw that past night. This sounds like fiction, but who takes poets seriously? Well, a Swiss pychologist thinks, that Goethe’s mirror image was a “self illusion”, an actually quite common phenomenon, called “autoscopy”. Nike Heinen wrote up this story about the roots of such self illusions in stressed or pathogenic brains for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

Heinen’s sources are two groups of Swiss psychologists and neurologists in Zürich and Lausanne and a German brain researcher from Frankfurt, who study the phenomenon to learn how the brain constructs the “self”. Seeing a Doppelgänger isn’t necessarily a psychotic delusion as long as the patients are aware that what they saw is not real. But some patients with a severe autoscopy called heautoscopy see dozens of images of themselves. And they seem to be as lively and rightfully a self as the “real” self. Heinen brilliantly leads the reader through the article: how a brain tumor patient split his self into a whole “family” of father, mother and three kids; how scientists did the experiments to find out, that we construct our self by permanently “watching” ourselves; how easy it is to fool our self awareness; how some patients loose their self; and how Dostojewskis epileptic attacks may have caused Doppelgänger illusions and inspired him to write the novel „The Double“, where an alter ego takes over the life of a bureaucrat.

Learning from Heinen in the beginning, that Goethe’s Doppelgänger-illusion was probably true, it would have been interesting to read later, whether it is common for autoscopy patients to see a (wealthy!) “future self” and think that their true self relives what the illusion did years before – or whether this was merely Goethe’s poetic fiction rather than what is typical.

Nevertheless, the article was challenging, because it left me with a strange feeling of a dissolution of what I formerly thought was myself.

- Sascha Karberg

Editor’s note: See staff info at top of site for more on Mr. Karberg.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 at 3:11 pm and is filed under German Language Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.