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.

 

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