The overwhelming number of those who have actually been diagnosed Capgras Syndrome share more than just the obsessive belief that those around them are mere doubles of those they love an essential part of the delusion is that the first person to be accused of being an imposter is someone whom they idealized in the past, but who eventually did things to tarnish that idealization. Very science fiction-y and more than a little horrifying, but not particularly deep or profound. They arrive in pod form, create a duplicate while the real human sleeps and when they wake up become emotionless automatons stripped of all individuality and serving the good of the collective. The story is simple: aliens from outer space launch an invasion of earth using the majestically creative conceit of transforming the native inhabitants into their weapons of destruction. By expanding the individual into the collective, however, what Finney really created with his novel is more akin to a new mythology. What Jack Finney did with the doppelganger trope in The Body Snatchers is often relegated to a generic categorization the novel is either science fiction or a horror or some hybrid of the two. Typically, however, the doppelgänger is limited to a single character, thus enhancing the dramatic tension of being the only one who knows the truth while everyone else thinks him crazy.

The idea that each of us has exact double out there has long been used as a literary trope known as the “doppelganger.”ĭoppelgangers have been at the center of stories by writers ranging from Poe to Dostoevsky and from Charlotte Bronte to Stephen King. The disorder is characterized by just one dominating symptom: the sufferer is convinced that loved ones have been replaced by imposters who are exact physical duplicates. In 1923, a French psychiatrist named Joseph Capgras co-authored a paper with Jean Reboul-Lachaux that described a bizarre condition which would eventually become a disorder named Capgras Syndrome.

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The body snatchers novel