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The confessions of a justified sinner and the psychopathology of the double

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Allan Beveridge*
Affiliation:
West Fife District General Hospital, Whitefield Road, Dunfermline KY12 0SU
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In discussions of the psychopathology of the double, acknowledgement is usually given to the various literary accounts of the subject by Dostoevsky, De Maupassant and Stevenson (Christodoulou, 1986). Curiously, mention is never made of the work that has been described by Karl Miller (1985) as “the cardinal text” in the literature of the double. James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, published in 1824 and since recognised as a Scottish literary classic, represents the most detailed and complex exploration of the theme of the double.

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Articles
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1991

References

Bloedé, B. (1988) A nineteenth-century case of double personality: a possible source for the confessions. In Papers given at the Second James Hogg Society Conference (ed. Hughes, G.). Aberdeen: Association for Scottish Literary Studies.Google Scholar
Bynum, W. F. & Neve, M. (1985) Hamlet on the couch. In The Anatomy of Madness, Vol. I (eds Bynum, W. F., Porter, R. and Shepherd, M.). London: Tavistock.Google Scholar
Christodoulou, G. M. (ed.) (1986) The Delusional Misidentification Syndromes. Basel: Karger.Google ScholarPubMed
Miller, K. (1985) Doubles: Studies in Literary History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Sims, A. (1988) Symptoms in the Mind: An Introduction to Descriptive Psychopathology. London: Bailliere Tindall.Google Scholar
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