| Delusional Misidentification Syndrome |
[jan. 26e, 2008|12:27 pm] |
Delusions are far easier to have that one might think. They're like a feeling that one has uncovered a great secret conspiracy, but that the evidence for it is undeniable. Small details morph into clues revealing or proving the conspiracy. The small "clues" or "signs" have great significance, but because no one can see them from your precise point of view, experience, knowledge, and situation, they cannot understand the meaning of the clues. How can people they understand the significance of small signs if they're outside a person's unique mental situation?
...The syndrome of subjective doubles catches my interest for some reason. It's the delusion that you have an exact replica with the exact same appearance, but with different character traits and its own life. You also might feel as though your personality has been transferred to another person. It reminds me of clonal pluralization of the self, which is the delusion the multiple copies of yourself, both physically and psychologically, exist in the world. It's a delusional misidentification syndrome, along with the Capgras delusion, the Fregoli delusion, reduplicative paramnesia, intermetamorphosis, the syndrome of delusional companions, and mirrored self-misidentification. Some of the delusions, like Fregoli and Capgras, are linked to disorders in face-perception.
Delusional misidentification syndromes actually remind me of dissociative identity disorder, although that seems to be more of an internal thing, whereas the delusions are based off of external information. But there is a lack of recognition of the self, even if it's not physical recognition. I wonder what the psychological mechanism for recognition is.
I wonder if there are any learning disorders that involve lack of recognition of self or others.
I wonder what it feels like to have the Cotard delusion. To feel that one is actually the walking dead, to feel your own nonexistence, to feel maggots underneath your skin and smell your own decaying corpse. I've read that it feels, paradoxically, like immortality. I once dreamed that I was dead and walking along the barren earth, the remains of the Apocalypse. I could see my own rotten flesh falling off. I was dead, but still moving about and thinking. It was a strange feeling; the very meaning of 'existence' was twisted and shaken and obliterated. Nothing was as it seemed. The world around me was illusory (the Cotard delusion, by the way, is linked to feelings of depersonalization and derealization). My thoughts were both existent and nonexistent. It was experience and perception that should not have been, that perhaps were not.
Sometimes I feel like that still. |
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