THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYYou couldn’t make it up
Neuropsychological conditions and delusions make regular appear-
ances in fiction and on screen. Capgras syndrome, in which a patient
believes that friends and relatives have been replaced by impostors,
seems a particular favourite. Richard Powers’ 2006 novel The Echo
Maker, for example, has 27-year-old Mark Schluter emerge from a car
crash-induced coma only to find that his sister, his dog and even his
home appear to be impostors or replicas.
Other recent novels inspired by neuropsychological conditions
include Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
(autism); Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (depression, paranoia,
Parkinson’s, dementia – not all in the same character); and Ian McEwan’s
Enduring Love (de Clérambault’s syndrome – the delusional belief
that another person is in love with you). Examples aren’t restricted to
contemporary fiction. Heinrich Heine’s poem “Der Dopplegänger” (set to
music by Schubert), Edgar Allan Poe’s short story William Wilson (1839)
and Dostoevsky’s novella The Double (1846) all feature characters who
believe they have a double, a condition known as heutoscopy.
In the movies, Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 satire Dr Strangelove (loosely
based on Peter George’s novel Red Alert) features the eponymous and
deranged German-American nuclear scientist struggling to stop his
hand from performing the Nazi salute in what appears to be a case of
Anarchic Hand Syndrome. In the 1999 film Fight Club, adapted from
a Chuck Palahniuk novel, the character played by Edward Norton
suffers from a dissociation of identity (also known as multiple person-
ality disorder). Issues of fragmented identity also crop up in Philip K.
Dick’s sci-fi novel A Scanner Darkly (1977), along with characters with
delusional parasitosis (the belief that you are infected with parasites).
The novel was adapted into feature-length animation film in 2006. In the
same year the South Korean movie I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK featured a
central character so deluded that she licks batteries for sustenance and
cuts her wrists as a way to plug herself into the mains.
While live theatre has never shied away from extreme emotions,
recent years have seen an increasing fascination with neuropsychological
conditions. In 2008 the clinical neuropsychologist Vaughan Bell acted
as consultant on a play, Reminiscence, based on the recollections of Mrs
O’Connor. She was an 88-year-old nursing home resident, first described
by Oliver Sacks, whose epileptic seizures triggered vivid childhood
memories. Paul Broks is another neuropsychologist who has worked
in the theatre, collaborating with director Mick Gordon on the play On
Ego (2005), which explored the nature of personal identity. In 2008, their
second collaboration, On Emotion, featured a cognitive behavioural
therapist, his daughter, autistic son, and a puppeteer patient, and asked
the question: “are we the puppets of our emotions?”