Today’s Rotting Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Perhaps the most absurd psychological delusion – in the Sartre/Camus/existentialist sense of absurd – is Cotard Syndrome, in which victims insist, absolutely swear, that they’ve died. Also known as walking dead syndrome, it usually strikes older women, and often emerges after an accident: they’re convinced that their suicide attempts succeeded, or that they died in the car wrecks that sent them to the hospital. The seemingly blatant fact that they’re sitting there, telling you all this, doesn’t impinge; these are people who can hear Descartes’s cogito ergo sum and say, Not so fast. Some even claim they can smell their own rotten flesh; a few have tried to cremate themselves. And in some cases, their delusions plumb the very depths of nihilism. As the first doctor to describe the syndrome, Jules Cotard, said: “You ask them their name? They don’t have a name. Their age. They don’t have an age. Where they were born? They were never born.” Neurologists disagree about the explanation for Cotard, although most feel, as with Capgras syndrome (where the afflicted individual is certain that a loved one has been replaced by an imposter), that two parts of the brain must be malfunctioning simultaneously. One theory interprets Cotard as Capgras turned inward: people feel no “glow” about themselves, and that deadness convinces them that they have in fact died, logic be damned.
Jules Cotard
Culled from: The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons
A Beautiful Poem
I stumbled across this lovely poem while perusing the January 16, 1917 issue of the Chicago Daybook newspaper.
