You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
We understand by 'folie à deux', in the strictest sense of the term, the transference of delusional ideas from a person psychically ill to another person psychically healthy, who then accepts the delusional system of the ill person and assimilates it into the content of his own consciousness. It is not yet completely clear to us what enters into the psychological genesis of the induction, in addition to dispositional factors, close companionship, and all the other factors through which folie à deux is known to arise. The deeper psychological mechanisms which result in the psychic dependence on and identification with the primarily diseased person must still be subjected to analysis in every case.
In addition to the individual adoption of the psychic contents by one person from another, we also find the process as a mass phenomenon, where entire groups of psychically healthy people are carried away by psychically diseased members of the group: world reformers and paranoiacs, for example. Indeed, great national and religious movements of history and social revolutions have had, in addition to their reality motives, psychological determinants which come very close to the pathological processes of folie à deux.
In this presentation, I have limited myself exclusively to clinical observations and have chosen from among a number of cases, a few in which I shall make a special attempt to clarify the differences between hysterical and psychotic forms of folie à deux.
Many years ago, while associated with the Viennese Psychiatric Clinic, I published a summary of a number of cases