Samuel Vaknin

“ Isabel snuck into the guest bedroom and settled into an overstuffed armchair at a penumbral corner. She was still wearing the same dress, though her jewelry was gone. I watched her reflection in my makeup mirror, as I was removing the war paint from my face, clad in my two-part, lilac-strewn pajamas. ”

“ Milton shrugged and tapped the empty implement on a much-tortured edge of his desk:
"Lots of speculation around, but nothing definite. Some say it's a problem with face recognition. You heard of prosopagnosia? Patients fail to identify their nearest and dearest, even though they react emotionally when they see them. Capgras is the mirror image, I guess: a failure to react emotionally to familiar faces. But guess is what we have all been doing in the last, oh, eight decades." ”

“ Ensconced in an ancient armchair, steamy libation in hand, I listened intently, absorbing every word that came out of the mouth of arguably the world's greatest expert on delusions.
"It's nothing new." - Said Milton, chewing on an ancient, ashen clay pipe - "It was first described by two French psychiatrists in 1923. Elderly people believe that their relatives have been replaced by malicious, conspiring doubles. They lock themselves in, buy guns, change their wills, complain to the authorities. If not checked with antipsychotic medication, they become violent. ”

“ I am convinced that you are not who you purport to be. You look like my dearest but you are actually impostors, doubles, hired by the perpetrators of a malicious operation, bent of absconding with my inheritance. ”

“ Next time she catches her own reflection in a mirror or a window, she will start to question her own identity. She will insist that she has been replaced by an entity from outer space or something. She is bad news. The literature describes the case of a woman who flew into jealous rages at the sight of her own reflection because she thought it was another woman trying to seduce her husband."
Milton was evidently agitated, the first I have seen him this way. ”

“ But they are not. They are doubles. They are somehow wrong, fake, ersatz, if you know what I mean."
I didn't.
"I love my real relatives but not the current occupants of their corporeal remains. I keep my door locked at night!"
She made it sound like an unprecedented event.
"Isabel, sit down, please." - I said and she did, white-jointed hands clenched and venous. I decided not to confront her illogic but rather to leverage it to expose the absurdity of her assertions. ”

“ The patients are 'normal' by any definition of this word that you care to adopt. They are only convinced that family members, friends, even neighbors are being substituted for - and, of course, they are not. ”