Klee’s Persephone Delusion
An example given by Robert Klee:
“Suppose Persephone
believes with an utterly steadfast willfulness that
she is able to control the local weather by personal mental command (grandiose
delusion), that her left ear is a second fertile womb (somatic delusion), that
the last three Popes have secretly been married to her (erotomanic
delusion), that many of her body hairs are electronic antennae receiving
broadcast thoughts that are maliciously controlled by alien beings in
spacecraft hovering near the Earth (delusion of alien thought control), that
her eldest son was in the recent past replaced by an artificial machine made
exclusively out of metals with atomic numbers greater than 11, and so on.”
(2004: 31-32)
Reference
Klee, R. 2004. Why Some
Delusions are Necessarily Inexplicable Beliefs. Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 11: 25-34.