Hello everyone from a new week. “Your face looks so familiar”, or “It’s like I know you from somewhere.” Most of us often use phrases such as. Turns out, the more obsessive version of these analogies pointed to a psychological disorder. The name of this psychological disorder is Capgras. People with the syndrome replace people they know with impostors they think are very similar to them. This psychological disorder was also featured in the movie “The Wolf Hour”. The film was soon recognized as the best horror film in Swedish cinema.
In the movie, the depression process of the famous painter Max von Sydow, who constantly sees delusions and ghosts at night, is told. The painter, who struggles with this psychological disorder with his wife, disappears from the fictional island where they live.
Occurrence of the Syndrome & Cases
The psychological disorder known as “Capgras Delusion” or “Fraud Syndrome” was first described by the French psychiatrist Joseph Capgras in 1923, and therefore the disease was named after him. The first case was recorded with a woman who spoke of the existence of a fraudulent person who took her husband’s place in order to obtain her husband’s inheritance and confiscate all his property.
People who have the syndrome exclude people who they know with their bad features or who attribute bad features to themselves and do not allow it to appear in their consciousness. Therefore, when confronted with these people, whom he subconsciously discards, he directs his feelings to her husband, who replaces the person in his subconscious, that is, to his fake. This causes people with the syndrome to subconsciously exclude those people more easily.
Heavy blows to the brain also trigger the syndrome and cause severe damage to the brain. For example, a woman who had been in a heavy traffic accident was in a coma for a long time due to the blow she received in the accident, and when she woke up she said that the person in front of her looked very similar to her husband, spoke like her, but was not her husband, but was a fake who replaced her.
