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Musset, Alfred de - La Nuit de Decembre
Identifier
025274
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
Wikipedia
Cyclothymia is a type of chronic mood disorder widely considered to be a more chronic but milder or subthreshold form of bipolar disorder. Cyclothymia is characterized by numerous mood swings, with periods of hypomanic symptoms that do not meet criteria for a manic episode, alternating with periods of mild or moderate symptoms of depression that do not meet criteria for a major depressive episode.
Toxicomania - Substance dependence also known as drug dependence is an adaptive state that develops from repeated drug administration, and which results in withdrawal upon cessation of drug use
A description of the experience
BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL LONDON SATURDAY MARCH 3 1951 - VISUAL HALLUCINATION OF THE SELF BY JEAN LHERMITTE, M.D. Honorary Professor, Faculty of Medicine, Paris
The phenomenon of the double as we find it in literature has long been considered to be a purely intellectual notion or the result of imagination. But in fact all we know to-day shows that nothing is created that has not been more or less deeply felt.
Many are the writers, novelists, philosophers, or poets who have used the image of the double in their work……………
No doubt one can object that if so many authors have indulged in a description of the phenomenon one cannot consider them all to be ill or insane. Although I do not want to generalize to excess, let me remind you that all the writers who best described the vision of the double were singularly abnormal……………..
What can one say about Alfred de Musset ? Everyone knows that he was cyclothymic and subject to toxicomania.
No one has given a better description of this intimate relationship between the image and its original than the poet Alfred de Musset in " La Nuit de Decembre":
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"Partout ou j'ai voulu dormir,
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"Everywhere I wished to sleep, Everywhere I wished to die, Everywhere I touched the earth, On my way came to sit A foreigner wearing black Who resembled me like a brother. "
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