Eponymous psychiatric syndromes inspired by literature: from Alice in Wonderland to The Picture of Dorian Gray (I)

Literature has served, through the characters created by renowned writers and, at times, through the creators themselves, as an inexhaustible source of inspiration for mental health professionals and for authors concerned with the interaction between psychopathology and philosophy, literature, arts and cultural history in general. Such endeavors have often sought to give a concrete and expressive form to phenomena situated at the boundary between normality and pathology or, in some instances, to phenomena that are structured as nosographic entities within clinical psychiatry. To review the most frequently cited literary eponymous syndromes of psychopathological relevance, a narrative literature review was conducted, using the major electronic databases (PubMed/MEDLINE, Web of Science/Clarivate, CINAHL, EBSCO and Google Scholar). These sources were complemented by materials from the grey literature (doctoral, masters and undergraduate theses, unpublished articles, reports and internet-based sources), as well as by additional works identified through the reference lists of articles deemed relevant to the objective of the present study. The literary eponymous syndromes of interest for psychopathology analyzed in this first part of the paper include Alice in Wonderland syndrome, bovarism, Diogenes syndrome, Don Juan syndrome and Dorian Gray syndrome. Each of these syndromes encompasses elements of both conceptual and practical interest, and it is examined from a historical and clinical perspective, with reference to contemporary nosography. This epistemological approach opens the door toward an understanding of psychopathology as a point of intersection between tradition and modernity, science and art, hermeneutics and ontology, psychiatry and cultural history.