Disturbances of the imaginary

Features

Personality “as if”

1. Normality: the as if personality guarantees the patient the appearance of a stable life, as if he had a complete and sensitive emotional capacity for this. They are intellectually preserved. But, in fact, they follow a protocol without originality. The same occurs with affective relationships: affective expressions are formal and devoid of any more intimate experience.

2. Suggestibility: The person has a passive readiness to be influenced and an identification of an automaton type.

3. Presence of aggressive tendencies on the basis of passive readiness.

Mirror sign

The patient shows exacerbated concern with his image, examining himself long and often before reflecting surfaces. The patient has the experience of being side by side with the image and, suddenly, he may be filled with horror at something terrible on the surface of the mirror (himself). Detected in classical melancholic states and schizophrenia, but it is not uncommon in cases of ordinary psychosis. It has 2 stages:

1. Unceasing observation: The person experiences the enigmatic character of the image. He feels that a change has occurred, but he cannot account for what is unusual or abnormal. In this sense, incessant observation is a response to the more or less restless strangeness that the person experiences regarding the change that he identifies.

2. Autoscopy: the patient experiences the absence of half of his body, experiencing that someone like him takes his place.