A History of Delusions: the Glass King, a Substitute Husband and a Walking Corpse
Victoria Shepherd
Oneworld, £16.99, 352 pages
Where do delusions come from? How is it that some people find themselves on the other side of the looking glass, believing themselves to be made of butter, or to be Napoleon, or dead? Victoria Shepherd’s book takes ten case studies of delusion – broadly understood as “a fixed, false idea, not shared by others, and unshakeable in the face of decisive evidence contradicting it” – and through them explores how psychiatric disorders have manifested themselves over 600 years in people’s beliefs about themselves and the world. Some of the subjects are more familiar – Robert Burton, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy and a lifelong melancholic himself, or Charles VI of France, who believed himself to be made of glass and swathed himself in soft furnishings for fear of shattering – and others are less well-known, but each case springs out of the book’s central question: can we understand?
Shepherd’s treatment of her subject, and her subjects, mirrors the practice of many of the doctors encountered in the book – this is a project of “kind attention”, attending to the outlandish delusions she encounters with patient understanding. While much of the book takes place in asylums, this is by no means a Bedlam tour. Confidently and pacily, and with an intimate tone driven by the book’s incarnation as a BBC Radio 4 series, Shepherd unpacks each case story to identify the reasons behind the purported loss of reason. Often personal circumstances lie behind someone falling victim to delusion: such disorders usually follow a change in status or a traumatic event – the death of her children makes it logical for the early 20th-century Parisian couturière “Madame M” to believe her family has been abducted and replaced by identical doubles.
But delusions also tap into wider currents, both in their cause – France’s defeat in the Napoleonic wars and subsequent turmoil gave rise to a battalion of Frenchmen who thought that they were themselves Napoleon, with 15 housed at one asylum alone in 1840 – and in the way they manifest. The material history of delusion, and how technology affords minds in crisis a chance to orient themselves and shape their understanding of the world, is an intriguing aspect of the book. The development of glass as a new material gives Charles VI a concrete example of his own fragility.
An extraordinary chapter shows the interanimations of scientific progress, historical ferment and psychiatric disturbance through the story of James Tilly Matthews, a sometime tea broker who – inspired by developments in pneumatic chemistry and the work of Dr Mesmer, of “mesmerism” fame – became convinced that an “Air Loom” was being used to invisibly influence British politicians through manipulation of the air. As Shepherd notes, there are seeds here of the paranoias around technology in our own day, the deranging effects of social media or 5G.
Matthews was first treated in a Paris that was in the grip of the revolutionary Terror, where alongside the horrors of the guillotine doctors were beginning to conceptualise delusion in terms of psychiatric illness rather than humoral imbalance or demonic possession. Paris is at the heart of the book, and Shepherd deftly weaves the stories of patients and their treatment with the upheavals that shaped the city over the 19th and early 20th century, from the Revolution to the First World War, with the traumas undergone by the city underpinning the delusions of Matthews, “Madame M”, “Madame X” and the doctors who treated them – with the catacombs under the city providing a sub-plot that haunts the narrative.
This is a book about connections, demonstrating the resonances and affinities between the ten subjects and through that building up a picture of the ways delusion has morphed to match its historical moment, and how attempts have been made to assuage or remedy it. Through these histories Shepherd aims to build our own connection with, and understanding of, people whose delusions may on first encounter seem bizarre: through the stories they tell themselves, they perhaps tell us – at a time that often seems out of joint, even deranged – about the stories we tell ourselves.
Dr Philip Sidney lives and works in London and Kent
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