- Cotard’s syndrome
- (the delusion of negativity [le délire de négation])(1880)In 1880, Jules Cotard (1840–1889) presented to the Société médico-psychologique in Paris (the French Psychiatric Society) a paper on patients, such as those at the private nervous clinic in suburban Vanves where he worked, who customarily deny the existence of anything to which their attention is directed. "You ask them their name? They don’t have a name. Their age? They don’t have an age. Where they were born? They were never born. . . . If they have a headache or a stomach ache? They don’t have a head, don’t have a stomach." In line with the differentiation of psychosis that Ernest-Charles Lasègue and his successors had begun in 1852 (see PARANOIA; PSYCHOSIS: EMERGENCE), Cotard suggested that this was a "special form of psychosis [une évolution délirante spéciale] that seems to me to apply to quite a large number of melancholic patients who are not persecuted, particularly to those with anxiety, and it is based above all on the very chronic negative dispositions that these patients have" (p. 153). The syndrome is found in schizophrenia, psychotic depression, and frequently in the dementias of the elderly. The paper was published in 1882 in the Archives de neurologie.
Edward Shorter. 2014.