Pure Erotomania in Manic-Depressive Psychosis

Abstract

Pure erotomania was first described in 1920 by the French psychiatrist de Clérembault. It is a delusional condition, usually in a woman who believes that a man, unattainable because of his much higher social class or married state, is very much in love with her. The belief has a precise onset and occurs suddenly in a state of clear consciousness. Enoch and his colleagues (1967) claim that ‘some instances of this syndrome may be distinct from ordinary paranoid psychoses and deserve a separate place in psychiatric nosology’, while Arieti thinks that it is not a clinical entity but a symptom of paranoia or paranoid schizophrenia (Arieti and Meth, 1959).