A History of Delusions

The Glass King, a Substitute Husband and a Walking Corpse

Victoria Shepherd

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780861540921
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychopathologie

A curious history of the strange, wonderful and sometimes terrifying worlds created by our minds. 'An utterly engrossing book.' ZOE WILLIAMS For centuries we've dismissed delusions as something for doctors to sort out behind locked doors. But delusions are more than just bizarre quirks – they hold the key to collective anxieties and traumas.In this groundbreaking history, Victoria Shepherd uncovers stories of delusions from medieval times to the present day and implores us to identify reason in apparent madness.

• Discover how the King of France – thinking he was made of glass – was terrified he might shatter... and he wasn't alone...
• Uncover the peculiar case of the dozens of Victorian women who tried to convince their physicians that they were, in fact, dead.
• And learn how after the Emperor met his end at the Battle of Waterloo, an epidemic of 'Napoleons' piled into France's asylums.

‌Chapter I

‘Madame M’ and ‘The Illusion of Doubles’

3 June 1918. Paris. A forty-eight-year-old woman sweeps into a police station in the busy 15th arrondissement on the Left Bank of the Seine. She is dressed in the flamboyant style of the belle époque: all feathers and fur trims; performative hat and corsetry. She requests urgent assistance, and petitions for a divorce. The reason? Her husband, she insists, has been replaced by a series of doubles. Numerous ‘lookalikes’ have substituted themselves for other members of her family, her wider social circle, even for herself. There’s one who’s taken up residence in her apartment. In addition, she informs the desk officer, abducted children are being held captive in the cellar of her house and she can hear them calling out.

A couturière before she married, she will outline to her doctor, with an insider’s eye for detail, what she likes to wear on a daily basis. In his 1923 landmark paper about her, her doctor lists: ‘a black and lavender suit, a black “Amazonian” hat’ (which seems to be the love child of a bowler and large fedora, a sort of female cowboy hat) ‘with a veil and another hat in lavender’.1 She doesn’t say what kind the second is − perhaps she alternated between two different sizes for different occasions or seasons − but whatever the particular accessories that summer’s day in 1918 her tailoring would probably have been theatrical, a signature of the era, creating an S-shape silhouette, making a shelf of bust and behind.

There is nothing unusual in a fashion-conscious member of the bourgeoisie flaunting her adherence to the most up-to-date mode, except when you consider that, by 1918, the belle époque is well and truly over. It’s been over for years. The war that brought it to an abrupt end is still staggering to its own conclusion not far from where this peculiar scene is playing out. She is a walking anachronism. She continues detailing her day-to-day styling as evidence of her true identity, with forensic specificity, right down to the buttons and species of fur; features she will request that her doctor carefully notes down, so that no one mistakes her for her substitutes or misses any telltale alterations made by the impersonators. The real her, she points out for additional identification purposes, is usually accompanied by a little blonde girl ‘in an embroidered linen dress, with her hair in a French plait, a white Brandenburg coat with ivory buttons and lined with duchesse satin, a straw cloche hat with a fancy white feather, yellow knee-length boots. In winter: dressed in a fluffy coat, a velvet cloche hat with white or beaver fur.’2 The doctor will later share these details in his paper all about her. We can only imagine how this exotic creature with her stories of substitutions and kidnappings played to an overworked, nicotine-stained police commissariat in the middle of a city subdued by a seemingly endless war.

‘Madame M’, as she will be called when the doctor presents her case to the world, has intimate technological knowledge of the tailoring she describes. As a younger woman she earned her living piecing together fashionable garments for her clients. From the moment we meet her buttonholing a policeman it’s clear she is a figure living in her own private reality. She begins to map out the sinister topography of this reality to an audience for the first time. Her colourful and frivolous appearance is a good way beyond nostalgic. She is a ghost of the relatively recent but already misty past. The belle époque commenced at the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 and finished at the outbreak of the Great War. It was a moniker given retrospectively, meaning, essentially, ‘the good old days’. The woman at the police station is wearing the motto proudly. She operates in her own youth: the Paris of haute couture, when clothes could afford to be costume.

Back at the police desk, the officer faces her. Our ‘Madame M’ has described the plot in headline terms, but she has much more she needs to get across to the authorities. So what does she want? Her allegations are ludicrous, paranoid. By the way she is speaking, agitated, desperate, this is not a game. The stakes could not be higher. Children are trapped and in danger. Identities and fortunes have been stolen. Is anyone listening? Will she get what she demands?

This feels like the opening scenario of an Edgar Allan Poe short story. Her allegations set up a dark and fog-shrouded mystery. Delusions, though, have always been a murky brew of real life and imaginative fantasy. Delusions are by their nature useful to fiction because they so naturally and economically dramatise the unconscious desires of a protagonist; they make the hairs on the back of your neck rise. You recognise something in what they are communicating about the trials and tactics of being alive, but you are not quite sure what. They are uncanny, just beyond your comprehension but deeply suggestive. So it is with the idea of the substitute double. The eponymous William Wilson in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story of 1839 is a man plagued from his school days to adulthood by a rivalrous double. Poe portrays a man attempting to get away from the undesired aspect of himself by manifesting another self altogether, a splitting of the self. So often the fictional representations predate the clinical descriptions: Poe’s story trumps Freud’s concept of the repressed, unconscious alter ego and its drives by at least half a century.

In Dostoyevsky’s 1846 novel The Double, the protagonist is a low-ranking office worker with poor social skills persecuted by a double who resembles him in almost every single detail except that the double possesses the very social skills that the protagonist lacks. He is tormented by this ‘doppelgänger’ to a denouement which sees more and more replicas present themselves, and is eventually carted off to an asylum.

The doppelgänger, literally ‘double-walker’, was portrayed historically as a ghostly phenomenon, and, more often than not, a portent of bad luck. The concepts of alter egos and double spirits have appeared in the folklore, myths, religious ideas and traditions of many cultures throughout history. In the mid-nineteenth century English speakers began to overlay this German word doppelgänger onto the concept of ghostly ‘wraiths’. The English novelist Catherine Crowe’s 1848 work The Night Side of Nature popularised the term. Crowe’s book investigates a series of phenomena lying outside of scientific understanding, and she devotes an entire chapter to breathless accounts of double sightings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Most of her accounts are taken from cases shared with her by German physicians, each of which feature people who have been witness to doubles, either of themselves or of loved ones. Some can open doors and gates, some are seen by more than one person. They usually appear just before the death of the person who has been duplicated. In Norse mythology a ‘vardoger’ is a double who is witnessed performing a person’s actions in advance. The doppelgänger is a version of the ‘Ankou’: a personification of death in Breton, Cornish and Norman folklore. Capgras’s paper on ‘Madame M’ will be given the title of ‘L’Illusion des “sosies”’. ‘Sosies’, or ‘doubles’, is a French word derived from Plautus’s play Amphitryon in which the god Mercury assumes the appearance of Sosie, the servant of Amphitryon, connecting once again the clinical language of delusions all the way back to the myths of classical literature.

The psychoanalyst Otto Rank, a member of Freud’s circle, introduced the idea of the double to psychoanalysis in his 1914 essay ‘Der Doppelgänger’.3 Freud’s essay ‘The Uncanny’ followed in 1919 and suggested that fear of the doppelgänger was a symptom of an unconscious, repressed, fear of death. A double scares us because it forces us to recognise an anxiety we have repressed. It feels familiar.4

Rank made special reference to The Student of Prague, a German silent horror film of 1913. Set in 1820, the film is loosely based on Poe’s ‘William Wilson’. The image of a poor student is stolen from his mirror by a sorcerer who once promised to help him with his love match but instead becomes his double, and his love rival. The duel finale sees the student shoot this double, and, in so doing, kill himself. At the time of Rank’s essay, the cinema was still a very new technology for a general audience, and its silver screens offered a kind of double dream world in themselves, making them the appropriate place for audiences to watch a story about the crisis of the individual play out. A few years later we see the reflection of these screens in ‘Léa-Anna B’s eyes and her false belief – the first formally described case of ‘erotomania’– that a complete stranger was in love with her. The overblown true-love stories popular in 1920s cinema were a powerful two-way experience for a person looking up at them from a dark theatre, and encouraged dreaming and the projection of self onto others.

We don’t know precisely what the desk officer at the commissariat for the Necker district made of ‘Madame M’ and her startling claims. We do know, from the paper published about her case that she was promptly escorted to the Infirmerie Spéciale, a hulking edifice on the Île-de-France in central Paris housing a network of public offices connected to the Paris police. Here she underwent a psychological assessment, then was moved to the Sainte-Anne mental hospital for more interviews, and then, on 7 April 1919, transferred to Maison Blanche, another pioneering Parisian asylum of the age, one of a number established in the aftermath of the Revolution where modern psychiatric practice was first developed. It is apposite that our first case study takes Paris as its setting, as the story of delusions and the part they play in the history of modern psychiatry, is, in many ways, a French one.

‘Madame M’ was at the mercy of the system now, but what she found at Maison Blanche was not all bad. Here was someone who was not only willing, but keen, to listen to what she was trying to say. The doctor recalls clocking her as she walked in, describing ‘the pretty costumes of her younger days’ and ‘a touch of coquetry’, apparently intrigued by this creature from another age from the instant he first encountered her. The physician who set about taking down the details of this intriguing new case was a certain Joseph Capgras, and his name would be for ever associated with her disorder. Through her, he would become the eponymous father of a delusion ‘type’. ‘Madame M’s symptoms defined it. Capgras is almost the same age as the woman in front of him, just three years older, both of them in their late forties at the time of this meeting, and the fame and reputation of both parties will be inextricably linked. They are from the same generation, but you wouldn’t know it to look at them: Capgras wears his physician’s whites over a sombre three-piece suit, arms crossed as he listens, a neat moustache beneath a penetrating scowl of concentration. He gives his subject a pseudonym, abbreviating her name to ‘Madame M’, which renders her a poster girl for the new category of delusion, disconnecting her from her real-life family history even as it immortalises her. Capgras follows a standard physicians’ ethical code in not identifying a patient in the written case notes – he will only ever give us the first letter of her maiden name, ‘M’, and later drops in her married name, ‘C’. He would have known both her given names in full, of course, but she is no less mysterious to him. Anyway, she insists that she wants nothing whatsoever to do with either her so-called maiden name, or her married name for that matter, because they are no more than evidence of abductions and substitutions. The question of her true identity, denied and stolen by others, is the root of her crisis.

Capgras’s life trajectory has, like everyone’s, been diverted by the war. In spring 1919 he has only just resumed work as chief psychiatrist at Maison Blanche, the institution to which ‘Madame M’ has transferred. He is fresh from a lengthy period of mobilisation, which began in 1914 when he was assigned to help the evacuating casualties at the Battle of the Marne, one of the bloodiest of the war. This first meeting with ‘Madame M’ is taking place in the theatrical surroundings of Maison Blanche, an imposing classical-style building in the shape of Louis XIII’s chateau at Versailles. It is purpose-built as an asylum with three wings in a U shape around a courtyard. The asylum was evacuated during the war and turned over to a military hospital, and its hundreds of patients have also only just returned. We are just the other side of the conflict, but the impression of the war is everywhere.

Capgras will observe ‘Madame M’ for several years searching for clues as to the cause of her extraordinary beliefs. After countless audiences, collating any biographical scraps and domestic details which might make sense of her, he commits his thoughts to paper. He will share his appraisal of ‘Madame M’ in a lecture at a meeting of the Société Clinique de Médecine Mentale, published as ‘L’Illusion des “sosies”’, or ‘The Illusion of “Doubles”’. His peers are all interested in the newly revived subject area of delusions and love nothing more than a chance to argue out their different theories and interpretations in public. Capgras reveals the case of ‘Madame M’ to his audience with a dramatic flourish. ‘We present here’, he says, ‘a paranoid megalomaniac…interesting due to the existence of a delusion, or rather a strange interpretation: for about ten years she has been transforming everyone in her entourage, even those closest to her, such as her husband and daughter, into various and numerous doubles.’5 The principal delusion, the doctor says, is substitution. He also lays out a subplot for their interest: the ‘illegal confinement of a large number of people, particularly children, in the basement of ...