ABSTRACT
The ideal of the Stoic – the hoped-for effect of long-term exercising – consequently consists in the freedom from the overwhelming power of things and relations that intrude consciousness by provoking inner images, voices and conversations. Most solitude techniques did not intend any narcissistic “self-doubling,” so to say as a permanent staging of autoerotic “mirror stages of self possession,” but rather the defence against menacing obsessions and external claims of ownership. The one who was able to get used to talking to himself was able to neutralise the chain of commands of foreign voices by hearing his own voice – regardless of whether they came from priests, spirits, parents, teachers or leaders; he obeyed the internalised compulsions to submit of everyday “obedience” – a not just socially agreeable, but almost constitutive “possession” – through a state of alternative “possession”.
