Réflexions sur le statut de la mythomanie délirante

Abstract

Delusional mythomania is nowadays an underestimated issue. This author retraces the evolution of the concept from the beginning of the XIXth century to present times. Initially envisaged under the guise of megalomania, it was first seen as a subspecies of monomania, untill it underwent several attempts of integretion as a specific moment of the psychotic process. In the 1880’s, there was a heated debate at the Société Médico-psychologique in Paris between the supporters of Valentin Magnan’s “délire chronique à évolution systématique” who claimed that megalomania was a defense against persécution and the instrument of systematization that unmistakably preluded to final dementia, and on the other side clinicians like Mairet or Foville who claimed that in many cases no relationship could be evidenced between persecution and megalomania, and that the latter could usually be found at any moment of the psychotic process. At the end of the XIXth century, the discussions of psychotic mythomania within the German school mainly focussed on its relationship with memory errors. In his attempted systematization, Dupré described a “mechanism of imagination” which he separated from hallucinations and delusional interpretations. Nevertheless, neither he nor Kraepelin (paraphrenia) managed to derive a clear-cut clinical entity out of that. At the beginning of the XXth century, several syndromes were described that were clearly identified with psychotic mythomania: the Capgras syndrome, the Fregoli syndrome, and the intermetamorphosis syndrome, all of which were described as non-specific body-image disorders within various psychotic processes, rather than as independent disorders. Finally, this writer proposes to consider that delusional mythomania should be seen as an attempt by psychotic patients to describe the jouissance de l’Autre, such as it has been characterized by Lacan in his last seminars.