Abstract
Mirrors have been studied by cognitive psychology in order to understand self-recognition, self-identity, and self-consciousness. Moreover, the relevance of mirrors in spirituality, magic and arts may also suggest that mirrors can be symbols of unconscious contents. Carl G. Jung investigated mirrors in relation to the unconscious, particularly in Psychology and Alchemy. However, the relationship between the conscious behavior in front of a mirror and the unconscious meaning of mirrors has not been clarified. Recently, empirical research found that gazing at one’s own face in the mirror for a few minutes, at a low illumination level, produces the perception of bodily dysmorphic illusions of strange-faces. Healthy observers usually describe huge distortions of their own faces, monstrous beings, prototypical faces, faces of relatives and deceased, and faces of animals. In the psychiatric population, some schizophrenics show a dramatic increase of strange-face illusions. They can also describe the perception of multiple-others that fill the mirror surface surrounding their strange-face. Schizophrenics are usually convinced that strange-face illusions are truly real and identify themselves with strange-face illusions, diversely from healthy individuals who never identify with them. On the contrary, most patients with major depression do not perceive strange-face illusions, or they perceive very faint changes of their immobile faces in the mirror, like death statues. Strange-face illusions may be the psychodynamic projection of the subject’s unconscious archetypal contents into the mirror image. Therefore, strange-face illusions might provide both an ecological setting and an experimental technique for “imaging of the unconscious”. Future researches have been proposed.
Highlights
Mirrors have been studied by cognitive psychology in order to understand self-recognition, self-identity, and self-consciousness
Some schizophrenics show a dramatic increase of strange-face illusions
This explanation can account for the frequent experiences of dissociation [23,24] and experiences that are similar to out-of-body perceptions of another person who is located beyond the mirror [21]
Summary
Mirrors have been studied in cognitive psychology in relationship to self-recognition, self-identity and self-consciousness. During mirror self-recognition, a similar binding process is probably present for multi-sensory integration of visual (i.e., the mirrored image of the subject’s body), somatic, kinaesthetic, affective and motor representations into a global representation of the subject’s self. Strange-faces in the mirror are probably complex illusions involving different processes, from visual perception to motor facial mimicry, from self-other boundary to affective empathy, from unconscious contagion to conscious misidentification. A second hypothesis is that prolonged adaptation to mirrored face disrupts multi-sensory binding between visual and bodily representations This explanation can account for the frequent experiences of dissociation [23,24] and experiences that are similar to out-of-body perceptions of another person who is located beyond the mirror [21]. In the inter-subjective setting, some dyads can show unconscious synchronization of illusions as a consequence of synchronized facial mimicry between two individuals who are staring at each other in the eyes
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