You know how some people say that our mental illnesses change as our societies change, so that they end up holding a distorting mirror to our culture? I give you a great example:
The patient was elderly and lived alone. She was showing signs of depression, but it was clear that something more was amiss. She insisted she was trapped in the wrong timeline.
The ward to which she’d been committed was unstuck in time, she told her doctors. Outside, the future had already arrived, and it was not a good one. “She described then that the world outside the ward had been destroyed,” reported the doctors in Exeter, England, who wrote a report about the case in a 2019 issue of the journal Neurology and Neurosurgery.
The woman was diagnosed with a variation of Capgras syndrome. First defined a century ago, Capgras typically describes a person’s belief that someone close to him or her — a spouse or a child — has been replaced with a duplicate impostor. But in this case, the patient believed that the whole world — everything she could observe of it — was a duplicate, a fake.
S.I. Rosenbaum in the NY Times
Another case of you ascribing something quite old to "the present moment".
ReplyDeleteWhen there was a vogue for "chivalry" in the 1800s, people insisted they were actually knights of yore trapped in an ugly, honorless future; the same basic thing happened in Japan after the fall of the samurai class; etc.
For more than a century after his fall, people insisted they were actually Napoleon Bonaparte and bemoaned a world that had moved on from the height of his glory; much the same happened with Elvis too.
Don Quixote was an even earlier lament for knightly chivalry than the 19th century revivalist vogue, longing for a vanished past and loathing an unseemly present; Urashima TarÅ, though something more of a morality play, similarly deals with a man left adrift and miserable in a future world he doesn't know and that doesn't remember him.
People (including madmen) have been insisting that they belong to a "better" past for centuries, if not millennia.