Skip to main content

Fregoli Delusion

Current story may involve a character suffering from Fregoli Delusion. If you haven't heard of this condition it's part of a whole class of delusional misidentification syndromes where the brain basically fails to associate a person, place or object correctly. If you look at some one you've known you're entire life and you think they are an imitation you may have a Capgras Delusion. You believe that you are already dead you may be experiencing Cotard's Delusion.

In the case of Fregoli, the believer will maintain that people he or she meets are all in fact the same person in a variety of disguises. The delusion is named after a turn-of-the-century quick change artist, Leopoldo Fregoli, who would astound audiences throughout Europe with rapid, seamless alterations of identity during the course of this stage shows. Fegoli Delusion, like the DMS's, are often caused by traumatic brain injuries, particularly those causing damage to the prefrontal lobe.

Fregoli Delusion is interesting to me because of the many narrative possibilities that disorder represents. First off, I want to say sincerely, that if you or if someone you care about suffers from this condition please don't take my ramblings on this topic to be anything more than the musings of a partially informed amateur genuinely curious about misfirings of the brain. I mean no disrespect.

The Philip K. Dick identity paranoia aspect of this, though, are truly amazing. Imagine, for a second, the life of someone with this delusion. People, maybe everyone, maybe just one subset of the population are actually all the same. Actors playing a variety of roles. It would be like living in Cloud Atlas (the movie) all the time; people you know are Tom Hanks keep putting on ridiculous gobs of make-up and pretending to be someone else. It would be living with a conspiracy so incompetent, its very cack-handed existence was a insult to your intelligence.

"Seriously, people, at least try to cover things up!"

Somewhat more sinister would be a person where the entire world was somehow occupied by a shape-shifting other, like the alien from John Carpenter's The Thing. Everyone you knew had already been assimilated, it just hadn't bothered with you yet. Or possibly, like the 70s version of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" you might convince yourself that by acting 'the part' you might evade detection. Your life would become a very unpleasant movie.

From the literature I've been able to track down, the delusion can be more localized, however. The believer might identify only a handful of people who share the Fregoli identity. These quick-changers persecute the believer, stalking them. Sort of the faceless Men in Black at the core of every conspiracy story.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

With the title World War Z

Early on in the mostly disappointing zombie epidemic thriller World War Z, UN Investigator Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) hides out in a Newark apartment, trying to convince a family living there to flee with him from the hordes of sprinting, chomping maniacs infesting the city. The phrase he uses, drawing from years of experience in the world's troubled war-zones is "movement is life." Ultimately he's unsuccessful, the family barricades their door behind him and they join the ever-swelling ranks of the undead. As far as a guiding philosophy goes for a pop-action thriller like World War Z, 'movement is life,' isn't bad. And for the first half of the movie or so, it follows its own advice. Similar to other recent zombie movies (Dawn of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead) the warning signs of what the rest of the movie will bring are subtle and buried until all hell is ready to break through. The television mentions 'martial law,' Philadelphia traffic snarl
I’m going to take a slightly abbreviated approach to this year’s best-of lists and mostly focus on movies. It’s not that I didn’t read or listen to music but for whatever reason I feel uninspired to talk about either topic. C’est la vie! So in no particular order are five movies I greatly enjoyed watching this year. Firstly, Avengers: Endgame. Well, I guess there is some order to this list because literally the first thing I thought of in terms of movies I’ve seen is this movie. It is inevitable! This is the one MCU flick it’s hard for me to remember as simply a super-hero film. Although I found its predecessor a bit more more compulsively watchable, I really enjoyed this film. First of all it’s tone, which veered from despair, heist hijinx, parental reconciliation, to epic mega-brawl was never boring. Even the gorgeous mess which is that final fight has its own interior logic and sports some of the best looking cinematography this side of Black Panther. With Endgame MCU found a

Stephen King's 2017

Despite the release of a single novel and a few short stories, 2017 has to rank up there as one of the more Stephen King ascendant years. No less than four movies based on his works appeared, including one of the most successful horror films of all time, the first part of IT. 'The Mist' (Stephen King) by Dementall.deviantart.com Of course, with King, for every high, there are plenty of lows and 2017 also provided a number of examples of how to do his works wrong. But let's start with the good stuff. The movie adaptation of IT, directed by Andres Muschietti and starring a number of talented young actors (including Finn Wolfhard of "Stranger Things" fame) really captured, for me, a lot of what I liked about the original novel. Being scary certainly helped, but with King, the horror slice is never really the whole cake. What makes King King, at least for me, is the combination of earthy, believable characters with lurid, "Tales from the Crypt&quo