Erotomania

I guess it was after a female moderator on a so called 'recovery' group told me that she wanted to hire a hit man to kill her ex-'psychopathic' partner that I felt it was time to leave such environments. More disturbingly, I found no proof that this woman was ever in a relationship with the man she wanted to have brutally slaughtered. I know, I followed up her story.

In 1921, the French psychiatrist Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault published a comprehensive review paper on what was to become known later as de Clérambault's Syndrome, whereby an unstable individual comes to believe that another person—often a celebrity or high-profile individual—using coded signs, words and even mere glances, is sending secret love messages to the person afflicted with what is now more commonly known as erotomania. This condition afflicts mainly women and a small percentage of males.

Erotomanics believe they are being given these coded messages either in person (at a concert, or another impersonal encounter), and also through the media (during interviews, etc). It can even go as far as believing that seeing a certain licence plate on a random car or, the erotomanic's favourite colour appearing on television are declarations of love being sent personally to the individual affected with the syndrome. Erotomania has been noted for centuries as a kind of delusional psychosis/hysteria and which has been also coined with the terms: Phantom Lover Syndrome, Psychotic Erotic Transference Reaction and Delusional Loving.

Erotomania generally involves a woman with the delusion and a man whom she considers to be of higher social/public profile or status. A common form of the disorder would involve a situation where a young lady takes a course in college and then becomes enamoured with a male professor, believing that he is in love with her too. The erotomanic female then indulges in a complex delusional psychosis surrounding this man and her imaginary relationship with him, convincing herself of both his desire for her, and his complete devotion to her. This delusion may go on for a period of a few weeks, and in some cases may even persist for decades. When her romantic 'love' is unrequited, the delusional female will sometimes invent the most complex and bizarre revenge fantasies and smear campaigns against the man she is obsessing over, ranging from false allegations including everything from rape to implicating him in other illegal or unethical acts.

In the 1998 paper from the Journal of the National Medical Association, entitled Erotomania Revisited: Thirty-Four Years Later, one case involved a woman who believed that the man whom she was obsessing over had married and impregnated her, and that she had given birth to a large number of their children. She then claimed that these non-existent children had been taken away by her parents for a psychiatrist to give them up for adoption against her will. All this for a man she had only met through an adult education class and had never even actually socialised with.

The symptoms of erotomania include impulsiveness, irrational fear of abandonment, explosive bouts of anger and visceral hatred towards the man, while constantly alternating between idealisation and devaluation.

Thomas Sheridan is an independent alternative artist, author, satirist, musician, public speaker, broadcaster and researcher currently based in the West of Ireland. His illustrations have appeared on the covers of newsstand magazines, books and websites worldwide. 

The Anvil of the Psyche is considered a vital manual for personal and social survival in a world controlled by greed and false hopes. Thomas' writings and interviews have evolutionised people to build a firewall around their own psyche and not to be lured into handing over personal independence to an exterior collective or guru. As a result, his NO CONTACT EVER AGAIN philosophy applied to controlling individuals and groups has made Thomas an enemy of mind-controlled death cults and neo-Nazi fringe groups.  Thomas has also been featured in several films and documentaries.