Tomorrow I meet with my master's supervisor to talk about where I think I'm going with the exegesis. This means that I'd better come up with something to say that's a bit more positive than the previous post.
I have come across some interesting stuff. One paper I read was written in the 1960s by a team of psychiatrists. They did a study where they sat people in front of a mirror in a dark room for 30 minutes and recorded what they experienced. Not so bad, you might think.
Except each person was in there alone (apart from the researcher) and had to look into the mirror continuously and describe what they saw. The only light in the room was provided by the little light on the tape recorder, which was recording their words.
They used four groups of people: psychotics, neurotics, sociopaths and 'normals' (who probably weren't by the end of it).
Two things that fascinate me about this study. Number 1, that they got away with doing it (obviously ethical standards were a bit different in the '60s). And number 2, every person, 'normals' included, saw weird stuff in the mirror: basically, they all hallucinated.
So people sitting in a dark room in front of a mirror at night (the tests were done between 7&9pm) all described fascinating, horrifying and bizarre things that they could see in the mirror. A few people even experienced kinetic hallucinations (eg felt like they were rocking or swaying).
Every person experienced this; not just the people with diagnosed mental illnesses.
Right now I'm reading a really interesting book by German Jungian psychologist, Kaspar Kiepenheuer, who has a special interest in treating teenagers. In Crossing the bridge: a Jungian approach to adolescence, Kiepenheuer describes adolescence as a turbulent and transitional period. He writes 'Indeed, one might even say that puberty is a more or less mild form of schizophrenia.'
Put these two ideas together - mirror hallucinations and adolescence as a form of schizophrenia - & I think I've got something that's worth investigating.
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