Locked in the dogma

[Angrboda]

The following are passages from a document cited by one of the authors of the Wikipedia entry.

Douwe Draaisma.

---

Joseph Capgras (1873-1950) was a Paris psychiatrist, working mainly in Maison Blanche and later in the Sainte-Anne-hospital (Luauté). The woman that would go down medical history as “the first Capgras patient” was a certain Mme. M, a 53-year-old seamstress. In the final year of World War I she had been admitted to Maison Blanche, where she came under the care of Capgras. She was intensely delusional, claiming that she wasn’t really Mme. M, but a descendant of king Henri IV, heiress to an immense fortune. She said that her father had made a deathbed-confession that he had snatched her as a fifteen-months-old from her cradle in a family of nobility. Her true name, she said, was Mathilde de Rio Branco. A second delusional theme was that her daughter and husband had been replaced by what she called “sosies,” impostors who were the spitting image of her loved ones but impostors nevertheless. In 1923, Capgras and his colleague Reboul-Lachaux published a case study on Mme. M., indicating that her delusions of grandeur were a case of “folie raisonnante,” a concept of their own finding, meaning that the delusions were bizarre, but internally consistent (Capgras and Reboul-Lachaux; Ellis et al.). The authors explained that the “illusion des sosies,” as they dubbed it, was caused by “identification agnosia.” That is, Mme. M. had no trouble recognizing faces, she just failed to identify these faces as the faces of her dear ones. The idea of “doubles” was in a sense a natural consequence of recognizing a face but not experiencing the warmth and familiarity that comes naturally with seeing this face. Her implicit reasoning seemed to be that if she didn’t warm to her daughter emotionally, then it couldn’t really be her daughter. Capgras and Reboul-Lachaux argued that doubles were a creation of a “logique des émotions.” A few years later a Paris colleague proposed to rename the “illusion des sosies” into Capgras Syndrome.

If Capgras had simply published his 1923 explanation and left it at that, he would still be revered as the first psychiatrist who had a clear incling on the most probable explanation. Unfortunately, his initial article was followed by a series of articles championing psychoanalytical explanations. In 1924 he published a case study of a woman who claimed that her father was a double, due, Capgras assumed, to her incestuous desire towards him, a desire so taboo that it forced her to conclude that it couldn’t really be her father (Capgras and Carrette). This set the stage for a series of Freudian explanations for doubles, for instance by arguing that creating a double is a subconscious way of handling mounting tensions between ambivalent feelings: all hostility is projected on the impostor, whereas the lost dear one tends to be idealized.

Thus, Capgras Syndrome, as originally conceived, was a female disorder, part of the general diagnosis of hysteria. For the first fifteen years or so all case studies featured women. The first case of a male Capgras patient, in 1936, was published as something of a discovery, this case was so anomalous that the author hinted at latent homosexuality (Murray). Taking the long view on Capgras, one will find that the patient population developed from exclusively female to an ever smaller but still robust female overrepresentation of 2 to 1 today (Berson; De Pauw).

---

In most cases of Capgras Syndrome the doubles are part of a system of paranoid delusions. This is one of the reasons why every effort of loved ones to convince the patient that they aren’t doubles, but still truly their son, daughter or husband, meets with hostility. It may, in fact, make matters worse: the patient will weave their efforts into his paranoid system. In The Echo Maker this happened to Karin: when she began to talk about things that only she and Mark knew about, he became instantly suspicious, for this could only mean that this impostor woman had extorted private information from the true Karin — apparently there were more people involved in the plot than he first suspected. Hints at intimacy by loved ones tend to fuel the paranoia. Sadly, this also implies that the status of being a double is not without risk. There are cases on record in which the patient actually killed the double. In Missouri a Capgras patient was convinced that his stepfather had been replaced by an alien and decapitated him to look for the batteries and microfilms (Blount).