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BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL LONDON SATURDAY MARCH 3 1951 - VISUAL HALLUCINATION OF THE SELF BY JEAN LHERMITTE, M.D.  Honorary Professor, Faculty of Medicine, Paris

A Personal Case

For many years I have personally followed the case of a young girl who had a vision of her double nearly every night. This is how this phenomenon occurred. After she had gone to bed she felt as though she was subject to a spell and went into a kind of trance, during which she could be examined, because she was in an irreversible state, quite different from sleep.

Very often her body halved itself, and she then had her earthly body, which remained in the bed, and her astral body. This latter was savagely wrenched from her and taken into the astral sphere, but she could feel it and see it in the grip of Satan. The Devil would torture it in a thousand frightful ways, would shoot at it with a gun, would throw it into a bush of thorns, surround it with snakes, and finally-and this was the most horrible of all, because she was a good and pious girl-he would inflict upon it sexual outrages.

The division of her physical and mental personality was a torture to her, and in her trance she would implore Satan to give her back her double, to " redouble" her. When this double was given back to her, she said she had an unpleasant feeling of a dead skin being held against an open wound.

What is very instructive is the fact that this young patient had had epidemic encephalitis a few years before this phenomenon of the double began to appear.

Facts of this kind show that the vision of the double is not a romantic or fanciful invention but a pathological reality.