July 21, 2015 • 44 mins
Imagine waking to a new, terrifying sensation: Your seemingly organic body is actually made of glass. While doctors and loved ones insist otherwise, you know in your heart that the slightest bump or fall will shatter you into a million shards. While cases of glass delusion largely vanished in the early 19th century, a few cases persist to this day. What underlies this bizarre psychiatric disorder? Robert and Joe explore in this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
we're a little late getting into the recording studio today
because we just had in an office wide meeting with
(00:23):
cheap How Stuff Work legal consultant Richard W. Glazer. Uh.
Great guy, excellent lawyer. But anytime we have these in
person meetings with him, it's always a little bit te. Well. Yeah,
part of the problem is that you can't approach him physically,
and if you do, he will immediately start wheeling away
because he cannot be touched, right, and he's not gonna
(00:45):
find a wheelchair or anything. He is. He just remains
on a wheeled platform that's covered with throw pillows and
stuff with with hay. Yeah, it's basically a wooden palette
with with little roll the office chair wheels on the bottom.
Yeah yeah, And I mean you need that when you
suffer from the glass delusion. That's right, because there's nothing
actually wrong with him that he doesn't suffer from brittle
(01:06):
bone disorder anything of that matter. He's the guy from Unbreakable.
He's not the villain from Unbreakable. He's just he just
has this psychiatric delusion that his body is made out
of glass, which makes it all the more horrifying when
you roll through a pont city market here because everything's
under construction, Right, He's constantly afraid that the construction workers
on site are going to grab him and turn him
(01:27):
into a glass window. Yeah, but the meeting is over,
the meeting is done with glass or has rolled off
back to his the padded chamber of his offices, And
we're here to talk about glass delusion itself, the real
glass delusion that is largely a product of the past,
but as we'll discuss, has popped up with some contemporary
(01:48):
cases as well. Right, so you're not likely to meet
or have met somebody suffering from the glass delusion, but
there are times and places in history where this was
an extremely common psychological ailment. Yes, they're certainly common enough
that it pops up in the literature and well, as
we discussed that, uh, that raises some questions at times.
(02:11):
But let's let's start by just looking to the literature
and looking at some of the key cases that pop
up in history, and then we'll start teasing us a
part of it, sure well. One early case that we
have in the literature is the story of King Charles
the sixth of France. So Charles the sixth had a
sort of troubled reign. He inherited the throne of France
(02:32):
when he was eleven years old. He didn't immediately get
to wield power because some of his older relatives were
sort of ruling as regions for him. Eventually he came
of age and sort of took the throne in actual practice.
But Charles suffered from mental illness throughout his life, and
some of his episodes are described as basically paranoid in nature.
(02:53):
One of the earliest in our histories is that Charles
was out on a minor military campaign with a group
of knights and soldiers going out to I think fight
some near do well duke and a stranger approached the
procession that Charles was in and warned him that he
was going to suffer a great betrayal. And after this warning,
(03:14):
one of Charles's soldiers happened to make the mistake of
making a metal clanking noise with his helmet or armor,
and Charles freaked out. He started attacking his own men,
and he allegedly killed one of his own nights in
the ensuing confusion. But this is not the most topically
relevant of Charles's delusions because, according to accounts recorded by
(03:36):
Pope Pious, the second, one of the other common delusions
that Charles would suffer from was the belief that his
body was made of glass, and so he during these
times he allegedly refused to let people touch him, and
he would sort of like sit still and try to
cushion and protect himself from being shattered. He even demanded
(03:58):
some form of reinforce clothing is a sort of like
armor to protect his fragile body. Huh. You know, it's
it's it's fascinating to to think of this in connection
with his his place in life, you know, ascending to
the throne so early. Um, you know, even if he
didn't have even if his power was more symbolic early on. Um,
(04:19):
because it will we'll discuss the two things that keep
coming up with with the glass delusion is that of
the body is a vessel, breakable vessel and uh and
and fragility and uh and the impermanence of life. Because
here's a guy who you know, he's he's essentially a
vessel for blood, right he has. It's his blood that
(04:39):
has the claim to the throne, and he is just
kind of the the fragile container for that blood and
for that that right to rule. And uh and he
and he's probably throughout his life he has you know,
has a very clear view of just how um, how
slight that grasp of power and that position really is. Yeah,
it's got to be, especially the case when you are
(05:00):
a child king, Like if you inherit the throne at
a very early age, it's quite clear that you are
not capable of ruling yet, and that is made clear
to you by the fact that there are some older
regions actually pulling all the strings. Um. So it's not
really your merit that you can believe makes you king.
I mean, not that merit makes any king king. But yeah,
(05:22):
you're definitely just waiting your turn because of who your
parents were. Yeah. And it seems like the common tropes
that you see in in historical accounts and reenactments and
of course in our fiction, is you either you're going
at fragile direction. I'm who I'm this glass thing. I'm
just this child at the center of this huge wheel
that's turning or you go in the megalomaniac direction of like,
(05:44):
of course I'm in charge. I know on eleven, but
I know everything and I'm fully, fully capable of ruling
this kingdom right now. That's not the not the only
case we see in history, but that again, that was
that's the earliest glass delusion case on record that we
could find. Also, there's a sixteen fourteen case, So this
is some of the centuries later recorded by the physician
(06:05):
to fill up the second of Spain Alfonso Ponce descenta
cruz Uh. The patient is actually unknown. We don't know
who this individual was, but it was possibly a French
prince as he was also described by French King Henry
the fourth Chief Physician. So this is another case where
you have an individual who's just languishing on straw beds,
(06:27):
avoiding being broken by any kind of physical contact. Um,
there's a there's a large sense of melancholy in all
these cases as well. You know, it's like I can't
move because if I move, I might I'm I'm gonna die.
I'm gonna shatter. Sure, And we don't just mean melancholy
in in the modern sense. We would use it like
melancholy in the infinite sadness, but the actual sort of
(06:50):
medieval bodily humors based theory of melancholy, which was a
somewhat different thing. Yeah, and also far more debilitating and
and seen as is rooted in these these key these
four key biological principles, right, the four key humors. So
the treatment, of course was interesting for this and it
seems a bit tongue in cheak. I don't know to
(07:11):
what extent we can we actually believe it, uh, But
supposedly that the treatment for this individuals class solution was
to set fire to the straw in the bed, which
immediately cured him because he jumps out of the bed
for fear of the fire. And well, he doesn't shatter,
he doesn't break. And you see this kind of sink
or swim treatment in a in a number of the accounts. Yeah,
there was another account I was reading about in one
(07:32):
of the main sources we used for this episode, where
and I believe it was suspected that this is an
embellished or made up account, but the story goes that
there was a man who believed his buttocks were made
of glass, and the doctor cured him by beating him ye,
beating him like basically spanking him with a cane and saying, look,
your buttocks are not shattering, and the pain you're feeling
(07:53):
is purely organic in nature. And I think in that
in that account or story, the the individual with glass
delusion was himself a glass artisan, so you had that
level of complexity to it. Another example from history would
be the Flemish poet philosopher Guests bar van borel From
(08:13):
who lived from four to sixteen forty eight, also known
as bar Lais. Yeah, this is another individual who reportedly
suffered melancholy throughout his life and may have suffered a
mirror delusion, or it's possible he was just waxing poetic
and philosophic when he said the following. But how often
the fantasy wants to act absurdly and ridiculously in melancholics
(08:38):
of how much does it convince the unhappy fellows? This
one thinks he's made of glass and terrified, is fearful
of people standing close to him. And and and in this
we kind of get into one of the problems that
it emerges when you look back on the glass delusion
literature is that how many of these cases are actual
cases where someone was suffering from, you know, psychiatric delusion
(08:58):
about the nature of their body, and to what extented
they the embellish stories, are they just outright uh, you
know literary devices uses of the metaphor of the body
is glass. Yeah. One of the things about the glass
delusion is that it's so it's so imagistic, and it's
so evocative, and it makes a great story. And whenever
(09:19):
there is a condition that makes a great story, you've
got to be suspicious of some of these historical accounts
because they make such great stories. Yeah, it reminds me
of the you know, the old not even that old,
but the the the sort of urban legends about the
you know, somebody took so much LSD that they thought
they were a bug and climbed inside a keyhole, or
I thought they were a key and climbed inside a keyhole,
(09:40):
something like of that nature. Um, which it sounds wonderful
because it's so ridiculous and so ridiculous that it's actually
kind of horrifying. But then when you start teasing an
apart and saying, well did this really happen? Was that
actually a delusion or is it just make for some
compelling bit of fiction. Yes, So one of our main
sources for this episode was an essay by someone going
(10:01):
by the name gil Speak published in the History of
Psychiatry in nine and it was called an Odd Kind
of Melancholy Reflections on the Glass Delusion in Europe fourteen
forty to sixteen eighty. And the author of this essay
makes some really interesting general observations about when you see
this delusion popping up, and one of the most interesting
(10:22):
to me was that the author says it is an
affliction of the man of letters in Europe. Yeah, this
is interesting because because again we already touched on the
literary history of glass delusion that we see it in
medical accounts, published studies essentially of the day, as well
as as fiction outright fiction as well, and and that
(10:43):
sort of space between where you don't know of if
a have a poet or philosopher is talking about something
that actually happened or just you know, trying to make
a prove a point about the human condition. But any rate,
you have certain individuals who are perhaps saying already a
little um more inclined toward bouts of melancholy, and they're
reading all this stuff there of a class where they
(11:04):
have both the time and the ability to consume all
of these materials and uh, and so they're they're feeding
their mind with the idea of glass delusion and perhaps
allowing then their mind to to generate the delusion. Right,
So the prevalence of glass delusions could be kind of
self reinforcing. The people who are the most in temperament
(11:27):
susceptible to it are also the people who are being
fed stories about it, right. Yeah, It's kind of like
if if today somebody was watching a bunch of zombie
uh TV and reading zombie fiction and zombie comics and
then suddenly started believing that they themselves were undead or
but we're getting to have a very real fear of
of the undead. And likewise, if individual centuries from now
(11:49):
looked back on media from today and said, oh, there
were a lot of these zombie stories going on, where
any of these accounts actual happenings, where they were just
a fiction people were obsessed with in the day. Yeah,
is it life imitating art or the undead imitating life? Yeah.
Like one of the big examples that comes up comes
from Servants the Lawyer of Glass, which of course we
(12:12):
reference in our introduction here, which which tells the story
of of a lawyer who is essentially poisoned. Um did
you want to you want to break into into his story? Well,
of course yeah. So the the young lawyer is a prodigy.
He is very gifted and witty and skillful, and he
(12:32):
graduates from law school. And there is a young lady
who falls in love with him and wants him to
fall in love with her. So she comes up with
a love potion that is supposed to get the job done,
but instead it goes haywire. She slips the love potion
into a fruit that he eats, and instead of falling
in love with her, he falls into a coma. And
(12:55):
then when he wakes from his coma, he suffers from
the delusion that his body is made of glass. He
has contracted the glass delusion. Nevertheless, he goes on to
have a pretty famous and interesting career. So he becomes
known all over the place for being the glass lawyer,
the lawyer who has to travel around and a coach
filled with straw to you know, blunt all the corners
(13:18):
and make sure he doesn't get chattered. They say. He
walks in the center of the street to avoid roof
tiles falling down on him and shattering him. And then
eventually he wakes up from his delusion. He says, oh, no,
you know what, I'm not made of glass, but now
this is what he's famous for. So I have to
keep that. I have to keep it going. I have
to keep images of that, right. Um. So yeah, this
(13:40):
becomes a you know, a fertile meme for literate Europeans.
And you see glass buttocks showing up in a lot
of these accounts. They are all kinds of glass body parts, arms, legs, heads, hearts, chests,
but it seems like the most common one is buttocks. Yeah,
because it's also the most humorous. And I think, I
guess that's the That's the thing is that if if
(14:03):
you're going to tell a story about somebody with a
body part made out of glass, that the buttocks are
perfect well to mention. Another literary example in the English
play Lingua from sixteen o seven by the playwright Thomas
thom Kiss. There is a glass man in this play
named Tactus, who says to a character named ol fact Us, quote,
I am a urinal I dare not stir for fear
(14:26):
of cracking in the bottom and so in this we
get into the subset of glass man, in which the
glass man is not only a glass vessel, he is
a glass vessel full of urine in the delusion. Right,
So the author of that essay I mentioned tells us
that actually, at the time urinal was a synonym. It
just meant like a glass flask, a small flask, but
(14:48):
that it certainly had the connotation of something you would
fill up with urine. But sitting around the study and
you need, you need to go, you just grab whatever
kind of glass apparatus is the handy, right. Yeah. And
as just one of the uh, the connections here when
you start looking at the what glass delusion meant to
contemporary UH readers and anyone hearing any of these stories. Yes,
(15:12):
so the glass delusion isn't just about the physical fragility
of the body that the breakable nous. It takes on
other significant dimensions as well. Indeed, I mean at the
time we see fortune is often described as a goddess,
a fickle goddess that's made of glass. You know, it's
it's fragile, it's it's fickle. Um. Likewise, chastity sometimes explained
(15:34):
UH with the metaphor of glass. Uh, the particularly the
French bishop Saint Francis to sales who compared to the
human body to glass. And and then you have these
different human bodies going around uh, and they should not
be carried together without danger of collision and break it um.
And then there's this rich tradition in the Bible describing
(15:56):
the human condition as that of a vessel. And now
there's not a number of these these descriptions that that
appear in the Biblical tradition are conflicting and there's not
a definite thread throughout them, but one of the basic
ones is the human body as a vessel in which,
like the Holy Spirit is invested right right, if you
(16:18):
cracked this vessel, the pure element that's being poured in
can spill out. It's a bad thing. So sort of
the body is a temple type thing, right, Yeah. Yeah,
there's this idea that one wants to preserve his purity
and goodness, and but you do that by remaining intact
to not let it spill out onto the ground and
be wasted. Which makes me instantly think of the kool
(16:39):
aid man. Really is our our our generation's glass man.
He is he is a vessel of glass and uh
God or you know, the Kulai corporation, whoever has invested
him with this red power. You know. One of the
things I immediately think of then, is that if the
kool Aid Man were to lose his kool aid, to
be cracked and leak all of his red power out
(17:01):
onto the ground, he would not only be fragile and breakable,
but he would be transparent. You could see straight through
the kool Aid Man. And that seems significant also in
the history of the glass delusion. That's right. Uh, photophobia
factors into a number of these So not only are
you afraid that you're going to to shatter on impact
with any other kind of physical object. Not only are you,
(17:22):
you know, keeping yourself confined, you're you're super soft, bad,
but you're also closing the shutters because you don't want
light to shine through you. Yeah, because that would be
kind of horrifying, right, because they're the light is shining
through your glass body, revealing the emptiness of your form
in addition to the ephemeral nature of your form. Yeah,
(17:42):
it's like the ultimate privacy. Weird out. You're not only exposed,
but you're actually transparent. People can not only see your nakedness,
but see beyond you. Yeah. At the time when as
as optics, uh, you know, makes its way into everyday life,
especially for you know, learned individuals. Yeah, you know, you're
you're putting a looking glasses, spectacles on your nose, on
(18:03):
your nose so you can read, etcetera. By the early
seventeenth century, you actually see numerous books with titles that
refer to the looking glass to imply a means of
self discovery. So, as gil speak argues in his work,
you see a melancholic photophobia representing the fear of self discovery,
(18:24):
a kind of techno metaphor for the old adage the
light that sets me free, you can also blind me. Yeah,
So it's not just the fear of being seen through
by others, but the fear of seeing through oneself. Another
thing about the kool aid Man, he's made out of glass.
He seems like the perfect candidate for glass delusion. And
yet what is the other thing that coolant kulaid man
does all the time. He busts through cinder block. So
(18:48):
how does that? How does that work? How I've never
really really questioned it. I was just, you know, I
just completely trusted the media that I was presented with.
Of course, kool Aid Man can bust through a wall,
but he's a glass vessel. What's what's going on here? Well,
he could be some of that special reinforced glass that
you know they use in the in the army vehicles
(19:09):
for windshields and stuff. It doesn't break so easily. I'm
not quite sure why they would invest that technology in
the kool Aid Man. Or maybe it's all about the
Koolaid itself, Like he should break like without the kool
Aid in him, he would have no power. He would
be just that fragile vessel. But Koolaid is so good
and so potent that it can make even the kool
Aid Man of a creature of glass breakthrough that wall. Yeah,
(19:33):
Or it's just that the cinder blocks in the wall
have been made with sand and thus are very very soft.
Maybe that's true. That's true. So another aspect of the
glass delusion that might be interesting to talk about would
be the significance of glass as a technology, because the
bodily fragility delusion is not It did not begin with
(19:54):
the glass delusion. In fact, gil Speak tells us that
there are classical and medieval accounts of earthen where men.
So this is sort of older glass style. The ceramics,
the glazed ceramics that are not quite the type of
clear glass we think about emerging is the windows stuff
of more recent history. But back in the olden days,
(20:15):
you might think you were a clay pot and you
could crack just as easily as a clay pot. Yeah,
and the techno metaphor here, uh, you know it just
it makes perfect sense. You can imagine some you know,
member of an ancient culture and they have this ceramic
pot that they've created, a lot of work has gone
into it, a lot of artistry, and it's a it's
a useful item, but it's also so easily easily shattered,
(20:37):
so that that seems an irresistible metaphor for the human experience.
And as we discussed in our recent episodes on techno religion,
that we can't help but look to our technology and
our man made devices and systems and try to use
those to define ourselves, whether you're talking about you know,
metaphors for you know, agricultural technology or or construction technology
(21:01):
and ancient texts or modern interpretations where we we think
of our mind as a computer or we, you know,
illogically think of our memories as videotapes. Yeah, and very much.
I think there is the same kind of thing we
talked about in techno religion, where ancient metaphors, ancient technological
metaphors are very acceptable to us. Talking about the turning
(21:23):
of a wheel that feels sufficiently ancient and and deep
enough in the human experience to be a metaphor for
something magical and and related to God. But talking about
computers and cell phones that feels crass in the context
of religion. And I think the same thing could could
possibly apply when talking about what delusions are likely to
(21:47):
take hold. Things that are I don't know, have more
of an ancient pedigree seem to be more plausible to us.
Of course, then again, you do hear people saying they
put microchips in my brain. I mean that is modern
delusion some people suffer from. Uh do you know what
I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean we when we
take that that understanding of it and when and we
(22:08):
can easily apply it to uh uh you know, to
the fourteenth century, because this is a time when we
saw an existing technology glass really really developed, really evolved
because because we've had glass for a while, we we
have earliest some of the earliest man made glass objects.
You know, generally beads date back to around UHT b
(22:32):
c E. But around twenty we see the crown glass
blowing technique really kick off. Broadsheet glass emerges earlier in
twelve twenty six, and these really um change what's possible
with glass and the and the sort of applications that
we can we can use. And of course, uh, you
know we're seeing stained glass so up in in churches, uh,
(22:56):
which which has an interesting connection to to mystical thoughts
on glass. Uh. There is a certainly a mysticism of
light at the time, a key factor in the Abbott
Shuger of Saint denis his a twelfth century push for
larger windows and colored glasses in churches. And of course this,
you know that the mysticism light of light here is
(23:17):
you know, pretty obvious. You get into ideas of of
light as this, uh, you know, this metaphor for God's presence,
for God's love, the light of God shining in uh.
And of course optics have always been an area of
scientific inquiry, even in times when when science was you know,
lobbed in there with the philosophical and even magical pursuits.
(23:37):
You have glass, balls, mirror, other optical creations often used
as wards against evil spirits, are used in divination. So, uh,
there's fertile ground there for you. Even as glass begins
to show up everywhere, um, at least in the ritzier
parts of your your your local population centers, there's still
a lot of mysticism, uh, in if not the substance itself,
(24:00):
at least in the fact that it is used as
a convance for light, Yeah, and the fact that it
can be used to manipulate light. And I'm sure once
that happened, that must have been strange to people, for
for whom that was new. Yeah. I mean, look what
a stained glass does to the interior of a cathedral, right,
It transforms the light of day into this, uh, this
phantasmagorical mix of colors. Yeah, and light is something we
(24:24):
don't normally think about being able to manipulate, at least
not in the you know, at your caveman level of technology,
or even at your you know, early Middle ages level
of technology. What are you gonna do with light? I mean,
it's just coming from the sun. And you can make
it with fire, and you can I guess you can
put a shade up. I mean, what's so pervasive now
(24:44):
our optical technology and our manipulation of light that we
don't even think about it, but we are just today
we're just wizards of light. Like just in this room,
look at all the sources of artificial light coming at
us in the way that we're we're manipulating even the
the artificiality of it through various you know, various lenses,
through screens, through different types of bulbs. I mean, it's
(25:06):
it's kind of crazy. So today we live in an
age where we don't even question the magic. But if
we look back to this time where the mat a
lot of the magic is really beginning to come online, Um,
you can see where that would really get into people's
heads and help feed existing tendencies towards delusion. Yeah. Okay,
so we've talked about the images and the ideas that
(25:28):
fed into the glass delusion, but I think we haven't
really talked about the explanation for the glass delusion. And
this is always sort of difficult territory and psychology, where
you're trying to explain what need a psychological delusion answers.
But that is something that people have speculated upon. So
why does the glass lawyer think he is made of glass?
(25:50):
What causes that? Yeah? In this it really ties well
into what's known as terror management theory or t MT,
which is a direct from a cultural anthropologist, Ernest Becker's
efforts to explain the motivational underpinnings of human behavior, which
you know everything. Yeah, I mean that's the key argument
(26:12):
is that like the biggest thing in life is the
is the eventuality of death, and that every knowledge of
it knowledge you have to realize it's coming. It's gonna happen,
It's gonna happen to me, it's gonna happen to everyone
I know and love, UM, and there's nothing I can
do about it. And there's there's very little I can
do to predict when it's going to happen. And so this,
(26:32):
this knowledge of death, this knowledge of impermanence, is so
pervasive that it factors into everything we do, both the
fear of it, the wish to avoid it, and the
desire for immortality, either some sort of literal immortality through
today science, um, religiously through ideas of resurrection, or reincarnation,
(26:54):
or you know, you know less less literal ideas of immortality,
such as I'm gonna I'm gonna be faint, so I'm
gonna really make a name for myself, or have lots
of kids. That's lots of children, or I'm just gonna
I'm gonna make sure that my grave marker is made
out of stone. I'm not made out of stone, but
at least something with my name on it will be
made out of stone, and I will have a curse
(27:16):
carved into it than anyone walking through the graveyard will
tremble to look upon. And so you can really see
where if you look at life through the lens of
terror management theory, you can see how how glass delusion
fits fits neatly into that. You can see. Sure, Yeah,
it's kind of a perfect physical metaphor for realizing the
(27:36):
fragility of one's existence, sort of the metaphorical fragility that
you're always just a moment away, potentially from the end
from being shattered. Yeah, and you know, in this it
reminds me a little bit of a scene from David
Cronenberg's Crash. Did you ever see this one? No, that's
one of the few Cronenberg's I've not seen it. Yeah,
(27:57):
it's I've heard. It's messed up. It's messed up. It's
a weird lick about individuals who fetish eye uh, like
famous lethal car crashes and just car crashes in general. Um.
But there's a scene early on where, if I remember,
a character has been in a pretty pretty catastrophic car
wreck and they have just recovered from their injury. Uh,
(28:19):
and there there's a scene of them riding in the
car and it's kind of a split shot with half
of the half of the scene is uh, is inside
the vehicle, and then half of it is the busy
highway on the other side. And it really does a
great job of, you know, driving home this uh, this
character's realization about the fragility of the human body. Yeah.
There's that quote from the novel Sutree by cormck McCarthy,
(28:41):
which is is great if you wonderful. Yeah, it's very funny,
which is unusual for McCarthy. Uh. That says, what could
a child know of the darkness of God's plan? Or
how flesh is so frail? It is hardly more than
a dream. It's a great line. No, not one of
the funnier moments in the in the book, but no, no,
(29:03):
no contact with watermelons in that one. But no. That
Centre is a wonderful, wonderful book, full of plenty of
Corey McCarthy darkness in places, but also again it's it's
also core McCarthy. It is is most humorous. So one
of the things you might have noticed about pretty much
all of the cases we've mentioned so far is that
they come from a particular time and place. We're talking
(29:24):
about early modern Europe, and that was a particular time
and place in which this delusion seemed to take hold.
It suddenly became popular, and you had glass buddocks everywhere.
But there are some more recent and even some modern
cases of the glass delusion, and I think it would
be really interesting to transition to look at those, yeah,
(29:45):
because because these definitely occur outside of that era of
of glass is an exciting technology, outside of an era
in which you had these clear cultural influences, you know,
regarding the humors and you know, the idea of the
body as some sort of a biblical vessel, etcetera. And
then as we come to the work of psychiatrist Andy
(30:05):
Lemaine Um from Leaden in the Netherlands, and he has
in recent years claim to have uncovered contemporary cases of
glass delusion. Interesting. Yeah, he was apparently lecturing on the topic,
you know, just historically, you know kind of you know,
how how we've been discussing it. Uh, And then he
was approached by a Dutch physician who claimed to have
(30:27):
run across a nineteen thirties case of a woman who
believed her legs and back were made of glass, suspected
by the Dutch physician in question to have have been
part of her particular extreme fear of personal contact. Which
is which is an angle on it that that hadn't
really but we haven't really discussed and maybe as ultimately
(30:49):
a more modern angle to take on it, this gorea
phobia as the root of glass delusion in an individual. Yeah,
it shows up in some of these earlier descriptions about
people who who feared being approached by others less to
those people shatter them. But those older cases really do
seem to have more to do with death. It seems
(31:09):
to me like they fear all kinds of mechanical and
physical trauma, you know, being afraid of roof tiles falling
on you, or of being jostled too much in the
carriage or something which you're both kind of fears of technology.
That's interesting, Yeah, but but this is strictly talking about
personal contact. And typically when you're thinking about what would
break glass, you don't think about somebody's hands. You think about,
(31:33):
you know, dropping it on the floor or something like that.
But I can definitely see how this type of glass
delusion could come into play as well. Yeah, and then
you know, following this, another doctor brought him an additional
case from a different hospital from around nineteen but it
(31:53):
but but the really key moment in uh Leman's research
came when a young patient showed up at his own
hospital claiming to be made out of glass. So, of
course he did what you know that you would expect.
He said, well, we'll come on in, I will get
you a nice cushion to set on, and we will
talk about your glass delusion because I really want to
find out what's at the root of it. And and
(32:13):
he made sure uh not to lead the questions too much,
not not to immediately presume that it had to do
with with with terror management theory and a fear of
death and impermanence, etcetera. Say, here are the symptoms you
should be experiencing if you have glass delusion. Yeah, I
mean this guy's this guy's a pro. He knows what
he's doing, so um it. In questioning this patient, it
(32:35):
emerged that the patient's feelings were similar to the way
we see through the glass in a window, observing everything beyond,
has been not seeing the glass itself. So it was
it's it's tied in this almost a fear of invisibility. Yeah,
so not just being exposed, but but of being inconsequential. Yeah,
(32:59):
like I'm just not not only am I just another person,
but I'm a person that everyone just sees through, Like
I only take up space, but not in people's minds,
not in their actual perceptions of reality. That's fascinating. Yeah,
I think that the quote from from from the individual
as they were as they're looking out a window at
(33:19):
the vista beyond, they say, that's me. I'm there and
I'm not there, like the glass in a window. Yeah.
So in the right up we read of this incident,
they described how Lemayne found out from this patient that
the patient had been in an accident, and following the accident,
his family had been very overprotective of him, and that
(33:42):
this glass delusion served as what they called a distance regulator.
It was an attempt to have a sort of self
controlled level of distance and privacy from all of the
people leaning in on his life. So it might not
be that a person necessarily fears being in con sequential.
It might be that they desire to be less the
(34:03):
focus of other people's attention, which which serves to bring
us back around, interestingly enough to the young eleven year
old King Charles, right, because here's this individual who's at
the center of all these machinations and concerns about the
future of a kingdom. Uh, it's it's you know, we're
speculating here, but it seems like he would be very
(34:24):
easy for him to feel in consequential and overmanaged and overtouched. Yeah.
I think that's a good thought. And then, of course
there's also the possibility that the glass delusion has something
to do with fears of effacement and social humiliation. Yeah,
and this ties into the into the idea that we
live in this modern age where it's so easy to
have anxieties about our personal fragility, but also transparency, especially
(34:49):
of our personal space. Um So this again ties back
into that idea that that I am I'm not only
am a made of glass, but I am transparent and
I don't matter. I'm just a transparent vessel in this
world of transparent vessels. You can almost think of that
as being a physical metaphor for how some of us
exist in the online era, right in the era of retweets,
(35:12):
where where ideas and content often just kind of flow
through you and back out. That's where it's so easy
to be more connected than ever before to the people
in your life, but also more isolated. Yeah, I'm sharing
what I have seen. I do not produce my own light.
So I wonder if that means that we could see
(35:34):
more cases of glass delusion. Yeah. I wondered about what
the future of glass delusion might be since we've we've
sort of seen that it might have some relationship to
the development of glass technology throughout history. Like in the
earthenware age you have the earthenware delusion, in the clear
glass age, you have the glass delusion. What could the
(35:54):
future material based delusion be? Like will we ever have
the carbon nanotubes delusion? I don't know exactly what that
would be. I was just trying to think are there
any future materials people could feel like they were. Well,
one of the things I thought of was translucent concrete.
Have you read about this, No, I have none. Yeah,
it's concrete building material that has embedded elements like that.
(36:17):
It might be things like optical fibers that allow the
transmission of light. So the kool Aid Man could be
translucent concrete. That's why he's so strong, but you can
still see through him. Ah see he was. He's a
visitor from the future, bringing to us the joys, the wonders,
the holy miracle. Yes, uh, this this meta material. I
(36:37):
think that's something that's actually interesting. If you wanted to
think about a future in which we do not have
such fears about fragility, but we still have the fears
about transparency, maybe there will be the translucent concrete delusion
where we we still have all of these ideas about
who sees me, who sees into me, who sees through me?
(36:57):
Do I exist? Do I take up space? Do I
flect light? But people aren't so concerned about their own death.
I mean, this could be if we get the kind
of Aubrey de Gray future where where the ultimate bad
ending is not a physical death but just a bad
social outcome. You know this since this brings to mind
(37:18):
the fact that we do see quantum mechanics and also
theories regarding the multiverse um factor into a lot of
our considerations about self and where we are in our life. Uh.
And a lot of this, I feel is is you know,
comes from our consumption of media that employs those concepts.
Is there is there like a comic book or a
(37:39):
sci fi usage of meta materials that it could have
this impact on everyone? I don't know. I'm sure there is,
and I just can't think of it right now. Yeah,
Like I'm trying to think if there's a if there's
a comic book character who really makes use of some
sort of meta material or special material, um, clay Face maybe, yeah,
(38:01):
oh yeah, that's sort of like the fear of being Well,
it's always a metaphor and whatever the material is, it's
always a metaphor for your personal hangouts. Because clay Face
is what he's an actor, who's uh you know, is
he really anybody inside? Right? He can assume all these forms,
but he himself is formless. Um. You know. It also
brings the crypt kryptonite, which isn't a material, but it
(38:24):
is at an element. But we do see that used
a lot of Someone will say, oh, well, that is
my kryptonite. That is the thing that in and of
itself can bring about my downfall. So you know, here's
a thought that might be interesting or might be kind
of dumb. I'll let you be the judge. One thing
I was thinking about was that beings with partially glass
of biology might not be unthinkable in the universe. Because
(38:49):
here was my reasoning, and and this isn't original to me.
I've heard people express this idea before. Earth Animals like
humans are carbon based life forms, So we inhale oxygen,
which is O two, and then we exhale the waste product,
carbon dioxide, which is c O two, because we're carbon based,
if it were possible to have a silicon based organism,
(39:10):
and I have no idea if that's possible or not,
but it's an idea that comes up in debates about astrobiology.
And it breathed oxygen like us, would it inhale O
two and then exhale silicon dioxide the same way we
exhale carbon dioxide, because silicon dioxide is the main constituent
of glass. And if that's possible that is a legitimately
(39:33):
horrific space dragon that instead of flame breath has glass breath,
breath of glass. I like it though, it uh, you know,
brings to mind just last week we were talking about
Stephen King's Beach World in nineteen seventy short story about uh,
about individual's landing. I think it's like two humans and
(39:55):
an android, or a crew of humans and androids that
crash on a desert world. And at first it seems lifeless,
but of course you wouldn't have a short story if
there wasn't something out there. So the silicon sand dunes
sort of become sentient and then hypnotize one of the guys. Yeah. Yeah,
so it was pretty creepy. It's pretty creepy. Uh, it's
it's one of the great early King stories. And uh yeah,
(40:17):
you have silicon based life in the form of these
this you know, collective sand entity. But if that kind
of life form existed on beach World, then perhaps there's
on the other side of Beach World there is a
city where you have glass beings walking around, or a
glass breathing dragon, glass breathing dragons. Now they are all
kinds of examples in fiction of people shattering. This is,
(40:41):
in fact, I think, a very popular trope for some reason.
Oh yeah, one of the big ones. I feel that
really that really kicked off a lot of it. Of course,
as in Terminator to where you have the scene where
the liquid metal TEA one thousand is frozen solid with
the liquid nitrogen and then shattered. Yeah he's made brittle. Yeah.
So you see continuations of that trope, and we're trying
(41:03):
to think of a number of these. Time cop has
a couple of kills, it's great. My mind immediately went
to Jason X because there is a scene in Jason
X where Jason murders an unfortunate young lady by putting
her face in some liquid nitrogen that freezes it and
then shattering her face on a countertop. And then and
(41:25):
then Horizon there's a frozen corpse that breaks apart. Mortal Kombat.
Oh yeah, Zero does that to you, Donne. He freezes
you and then punches you to shatter you. Yeah, yeah,
sure does. And then uh and then of course, like
Mirror Creatures, there's the the Young Sherlock Holmes movie which
involved a stained glass night, or at least the the
(41:45):
hallucination of a stone of a stained glass night killing somebody. Um,
I seem to recall that both Krull and Barbarella had
minions that shatter into into shards when they're killed. You
linked in the notes for this episode a wonderful scene
from the movie Warlock three that I watched late at
night last night, right before I went to bed. Julian
(42:07):
sands right, and he was he's he's wonderful, And yeah,
he turns a woman into glass and then shatters her,
not with the most pristine of special effects. Everybody still doesn't,
so God bless him. Um. Likewise, Uh, there's a you know,
there's a scene in Labyrinth that involves a reality shattering
into glass. Pretty much anything that you could run across
(42:29):
that involves Medusa or a gorgon, there's no if you're
gonna turn an individual into stone, you also need to
shatter somebody that has been turned into stone. Yeah, even
in an age where the glass delusion might not be
a common delusion for people to actually suffer from, it
is still a very common image in our imagination for
some reason. Yeah, because you have things in our life
(42:51):
that are beautiful, well crafted, in pristine and we attach
a lot of value to them, and they are so
easily trashed, they're so easily bro can it don nothing
and made made completely useless, made May you know their
their beauty transformed into just ugliness. And we can't help
but see our own reflection and see our own doom.
(43:12):
Uh in those examples. All right, So there you have it,
mirror delusion. You know, a brief journey through the history
of mirror delusion, where it came from and how it
it really hasn't gone away? Uh, you know out certainly
the delusion itself is a psychiatric manifestation. You do see
very few cases off today, but the the the the idea,
(43:33):
the concept, the tying of of of impermanence to shattered
objects continues to reson it. Yeah, we'll always have Mortal Kombat.
We will, We always will. All right. Hey, in the meantime,
do you want to check out more episodes of Stuff
to Blow Your Mind? Go to Stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. That's the mothership. That's where you'll find uh,
all the blog posts, all the podcast episodes, all the videos.
(43:54):
Links out to our social media accounts because you can
find us on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, or Google Plus. And hey,
the landing page for this episode will include links to
some on site materials that are related, as well as
to a couple of offsite sources. If you want to
explore this topic further, and if you want to tell
us about your favorite scene in a movie where somebody
(44:15):
gets turned into glass or some other brittle material and
then shattered, or if you want to tell us about
an interesting delusion where people thought their body was made
of some foreign substance or material, you can email us
at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
(44:35):
how stuff works dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
we're a little late getting into the recording studio today
because we just had in an office wide meeting with
(00:23):
cheap How Stuff Work legal consultant Richard W. Glazer. Uh.
Great guy, excellent lawyer. But anytime we have these in
person meetings with him, it's always a little bit te. Well. Yeah,
part of the problem is that you can't approach him physically,
and if you do, he will immediately start wheeling away
because he cannot be touched, right, and he's not gonna
(00:45):
find a wheelchair or anything. He is. He just remains
on a wheeled platform that's covered with throw pillows and
stuff with with hay. Yeah, it's basically a wooden palette
with with little roll the office chair wheels on the bottom.
Yeah yeah, And I mean you need that when you
suffer from the glass delusion. That's right, because there's nothing
actually wrong with him that he doesn't suffer from brittle
(01:06):
bone disorder anything of that matter. He's the guy from Unbreakable.
He's not the villain from Unbreakable. He's just he just
has this psychiatric delusion that his body is made out
of glass, which makes it all the more horrifying when
you roll through a pont city market here because everything's
under construction, Right, He's constantly afraid that the construction workers
on site are going to grab him and turn him
(01:27):
into a glass window. Yeah, but the meeting is over,
the meeting is done with glass or has rolled off
back to his the padded chamber of his offices, And
we're here to talk about glass delusion itself, the real
glass delusion that is largely a product of the past,
but as we'll discuss, has popped up with some contemporary
(01:48):
cases as well. Right, so you're not likely to meet
or have met somebody suffering from the glass delusion, but
there are times and places in history where this was
an extremely common psychological ailment. Yes, they're certainly common enough
that it pops up in the literature and well, as
we discussed that, uh, that raises some questions at times.
(02:11):
But let's let's start by just looking to the literature
and looking at some of the key cases that pop
up in history, and then we'll start teasing us a
part of it, sure well. One early case that we
have in the literature is the story of King Charles
the sixth of France. So Charles the sixth had a
sort of troubled reign. He inherited the throne of France
(02:32):
when he was eleven years old. He didn't immediately get
to wield power because some of his older relatives were
sort of ruling as regions for him. Eventually he came
of age and sort of took the throne in actual practice.
But Charles suffered from mental illness throughout his life, and
some of his episodes are described as basically paranoid in nature.
(02:53):
One of the earliest in our histories is that Charles
was out on a minor military campaign with a group
of knights and soldiers going out to I think fight
some near do well duke and a stranger approached the
procession that Charles was in and warned him that he
was going to suffer a great betrayal. And after this warning,
(03:14):
one of Charles's soldiers happened to make the mistake of
making a metal clanking noise with his helmet or armor,
and Charles freaked out. He started attacking his own men,
and he allegedly killed one of his own nights in
the ensuing confusion. But this is not the most topically
relevant of Charles's delusions because, according to accounts recorded by
(03:36):
Pope Pious, the second, one of the other common delusions
that Charles would suffer from was the belief that his
body was made of glass, and so he during these
times he allegedly refused to let people touch him, and
he would sort of like sit still and try to
cushion and protect himself from being shattered. He even demanded
(03:58):
some form of reinforce clothing is a sort of like
armor to protect his fragile body. Huh. You know, it's
it's it's fascinating to to think of this in connection
with his his place in life, you know, ascending to
the throne so early. Um, you know, even if he
didn't have even if his power was more symbolic early on. Um,
(04:19):
because it will we'll discuss the two things that keep
coming up with with the glass delusion is that of
the body is a vessel, breakable vessel and uh and
and fragility and uh and the impermanence of life. Because
here's a guy who you know, he's he's essentially a
vessel for blood, right he has. It's his blood that
(04:39):
has the claim to the throne, and he is just
kind of the the fragile container for that blood and
for that that right to rule. And uh and he
and he's probably throughout his life he has you know,
has a very clear view of just how um, how
slight that grasp of power and that position really is. Yeah,
it's got to be, especially the case when you are
(05:00):
a child king, Like if you inherit the throne at
a very early age, it's quite clear that you are
not capable of ruling yet, and that is made clear
to you by the fact that there are some older
regions actually pulling all the strings. Um. So it's not
really your merit that you can believe makes you king.
I mean, not that merit makes any king king. But yeah,
(05:22):
you're definitely just waiting your turn because of who your
parents were. Yeah. And it seems like the common tropes
that you see in in historical accounts and reenactments and
of course in our fiction, is you either you're going
at fragile direction. I'm who I'm this glass thing. I'm
just this child at the center of this huge wheel
that's turning or you go in the megalomaniac direction of like,
(05:44):
of course I'm in charge. I know on eleven, but
I know everything and I'm fully, fully capable of ruling
this kingdom right now. That's not the not the only
case we see in history, but that again, that was
that's the earliest glass delusion case on record that we
could find. Also, there's a sixteen fourteen case, So this
is some of the centuries later recorded by the physician
(06:05):
to fill up the second of Spain Alfonso Ponce descenta
cruz Uh. The patient is actually unknown. We don't know
who this individual was, but it was possibly a French
prince as he was also described by French King Henry
the fourth Chief Physician. So this is another case where
you have an individual who's just languishing on straw beds,
(06:27):
avoiding being broken by any kind of physical contact. Um,
there's a there's a large sense of melancholy in all
these cases as well. You know, it's like I can't
move because if I move, I might I'm I'm gonna die.
I'm gonna shatter. Sure, And we don't just mean melancholy
in in the modern sense. We would use it like
melancholy in the infinite sadness, but the actual sort of
(06:50):
medieval bodily humors based theory of melancholy, which was a
somewhat different thing. Yeah, and also far more debilitating and
and seen as is rooted in these these key these
four key biological principles, right, the four key humors. So
the treatment, of course was interesting for this and it
seems a bit tongue in cheak. I don't know to
(07:11):
what extent we can we actually believe it, uh, But
supposedly that the treatment for this individuals class solution was
to set fire to the straw in the bed, which
immediately cured him because he jumps out of the bed
for fear of the fire. And well, he doesn't shatter,
he doesn't break. And you see this kind of sink
or swim treatment in a in a number of the accounts. Yeah,
there was another account I was reading about in one
(07:32):
of the main sources we used for this episode, where
and I believe it was suspected that this is an
embellished or made up account, but the story goes that
there was a man who believed his buttocks were made
of glass, and the doctor cured him by beating him ye,
beating him like basically spanking him with a cane and saying, look,
your buttocks are not shattering, and the pain you're feeling
(07:53):
is purely organic in nature. And I think in that
in that account or story, the the individual with glass
delusion was himself a glass artisan, so you had that
level of complexity to it. Another example from history would
be the Flemish poet philosopher Guests bar van borel From
(08:13):
who lived from four to sixteen forty eight, also known
as bar Lais. Yeah, this is another individual who reportedly
suffered melancholy throughout his life and may have suffered a
mirror delusion, or it's possible he was just waxing poetic
and philosophic when he said the following. But how often
the fantasy wants to act absurdly and ridiculously in melancholics
(08:38):
of how much does it convince the unhappy fellows? This
one thinks he's made of glass and terrified, is fearful
of people standing close to him. And and and in this
we kind of get into one of the problems that
it emerges when you look back on the glass delusion
literature is that how many of these cases are actual
cases where someone was suffering from, you know, psychiatric delusion
(08:58):
about the nature of their body, and to what extented
they the embellish stories, are they just outright uh, you
know literary devices uses of the metaphor of the body
is glass. Yeah. One of the things about the glass
delusion is that it's so it's so imagistic, and it's
so evocative, and it makes a great story. And whenever
(09:19):
there is a condition that makes a great story, you've
got to be suspicious of some of these historical accounts
because they make such great stories. Yeah, it reminds me
of the you know, the old not even that old,
but the the the sort of urban legends about the
you know, somebody took so much LSD that they thought
they were a bug and climbed inside a keyhole, or
I thought they were a key and climbed inside a keyhole,
(09:40):
something like of that nature. Um, which it sounds wonderful
because it's so ridiculous and so ridiculous that it's actually
kind of horrifying. But then when you start teasing an
apart and saying, well did this really happen? Was that
actually a delusion or is it just make for some
compelling bit of fiction. Yes, So one of our main
sources for this episode was an essay by someone going
(10:01):
by the name gil Speak published in the History of
Psychiatry in nine and it was called an Odd Kind
of Melancholy Reflections on the Glass Delusion in Europe fourteen
forty to sixteen eighty. And the author of this essay
makes some really interesting general observations about when you see
this delusion popping up, and one of the most interesting
(10:22):
to me was that the author says it is an
affliction of the man of letters in Europe. Yeah, this
is interesting because because again we already touched on the
literary history of glass delusion that we see it in
medical accounts, published studies essentially of the day, as well
as as fiction outright fiction as well, and and that
(10:43):
sort of space between where you don't know of if
a have a poet or philosopher is talking about something
that actually happened or just you know, trying to make
a prove a point about the human condition. But any rate,
you have certain individuals who are perhaps saying already a
little um more inclined toward bouts of melancholy, and they're
reading all this stuff there of a class where they
(11:04):
have both the time and the ability to consume all
of these materials and uh, and so they're they're feeding
their mind with the idea of glass delusion and perhaps
allowing then their mind to to generate the delusion. Right,
So the prevalence of glass delusions could be kind of
self reinforcing. The people who are the most in temperament
(11:27):
susceptible to it are also the people who are being
fed stories about it, right. Yeah, It's kind of like
if if today somebody was watching a bunch of zombie
uh TV and reading zombie fiction and zombie comics and
then suddenly started believing that they themselves were undead or
but we're getting to have a very real fear of
of the undead. And likewise, if individual centuries from now
(11:49):
looked back on media from today and said, oh, there
were a lot of these zombie stories going on, where
any of these accounts actual happenings, where they were just
a fiction people were obsessed with in the day. Yeah,
is it life imitating art or the undead imitating life? Yeah.
Like one of the big examples that comes up comes
from Servants the Lawyer of Glass, which of course we
(12:12):
reference in our introduction here, which which tells the story
of of a lawyer who is essentially poisoned. Um did
you want to you want to break into into his story? Well,
of course yeah. So the the young lawyer is a prodigy.
He is very gifted and witty and skillful, and he
(12:32):
graduates from law school. And there is a young lady
who falls in love with him and wants him to
fall in love with her. So she comes up with
a love potion that is supposed to get the job done,
but instead it goes haywire. She slips the love potion
into a fruit that he eats, and instead of falling
in love with her, he falls into a coma. And
(12:55):
then when he wakes from his coma, he suffers from
the delusion that his body is made of glass. He
has contracted the glass delusion. Nevertheless, he goes on to
have a pretty famous and interesting career. So he becomes
known all over the place for being the glass lawyer,
the lawyer who has to travel around and a coach
filled with straw to you know, blunt all the corners
(13:18):
and make sure he doesn't get chattered. They say. He
walks in the center of the street to avoid roof
tiles falling down on him and shattering him. And then
eventually he wakes up from his delusion. He says, oh, no,
you know what, I'm not made of glass, but now
this is what he's famous for. So I have to
keep that. I have to keep it going. I have
to keep images of that, right. Um. So yeah, this
(13:40):
becomes a you know, a fertile meme for literate Europeans.
And you see glass buttocks showing up in a lot
of these accounts. They are all kinds of glass body parts, arms, legs, heads, hearts, chests,
but it seems like the most common one is buttocks. Yeah,
because it's also the most humorous. And I think, I
guess that's the That's the thing is that if if
(14:03):
you're going to tell a story about somebody with a
body part made out of glass, that the buttocks are
perfect well to mention. Another literary example in the English
play Lingua from sixteen o seven by the playwright Thomas
thom Kiss. There is a glass man in this play
named Tactus, who says to a character named ol fact Us, quote,
I am a urinal I dare not stir for fear
(14:26):
of cracking in the bottom and so in this we
get into the subset of glass man, in which the
glass man is not only a glass vessel, he is
a glass vessel full of urine in the delusion. Right,
So the author of that essay I mentioned tells us
that actually, at the time urinal was a synonym. It
just meant like a glass flask, a small flask, but
(14:48):
that it certainly had the connotation of something you would
fill up with urine. But sitting around the study and
you need, you need to go, you just grab whatever
kind of glass apparatus is the handy, right. Yeah. And
as just one of the uh, the connections here when
you start looking at the what glass delusion meant to
contemporary UH readers and anyone hearing any of these stories. Yes,
(15:12):
so the glass delusion isn't just about the physical fragility
of the body that the breakable nous. It takes on
other significant dimensions as well. Indeed, I mean at the
time we see fortune is often described as a goddess,
a fickle goddess that's made of glass. You know, it's
it's fragile, it's it's fickle. Um. Likewise, chastity sometimes explained
(15:34):
UH with the metaphor of glass. Uh, the particularly the
French bishop Saint Francis to sales who compared to the
human body to glass. And and then you have these
different human bodies going around uh, and they should not
be carried together without danger of collision and break it um.
And then there's this rich tradition in the Bible describing
(15:56):
the human condition as that of a vessel. And now
there's not a number of these these descriptions that that
appear in the Biblical tradition are conflicting and there's not
a definite thread throughout them, but one of the basic
ones is the human body as a vessel in which,
like the Holy Spirit is invested right right, if you
(16:18):
cracked this vessel, the pure element that's being poured in
can spill out. It's a bad thing. So sort of
the body is a temple type thing, right, Yeah. Yeah,
there's this idea that one wants to preserve his purity
and goodness, and but you do that by remaining intact
to not let it spill out onto the ground and
be wasted. Which makes me instantly think of the kool
(16:39):
aid man. Really is our our our generation's glass man.
He is he is a vessel of glass and uh
God or you know, the Kulai corporation, whoever has invested
him with this red power. You know. One of the
things I immediately think of then, is that if the
kool Aid Man were to lose his kool aid, to
be cracked and leak all of his red power out
(17:01):
onto the ground, he would not only be fragile and breakable,
but he would be transparent. You could see straight through
the kool Aid Man. And that seems significant also in
the history of the glass delusion. That's right. Uh, photophobia
factors into a number of these So not only are
you afraid that you're going to to shatter on impact
with any other kind of physical object. Not only are you,
(17:22):
you know, keeping yourself confined, you're you're super soft, bad,
but you're also closing the shutters because you don't want
light to shine through you. Yeah, because that would be
kind of horrifying, right, because they're the light is shining
through your glass body, revealing the emptiness of your form
in addition to the ephemeral nature of your form. Yeah,
(17:42):
it's like the ultimate privacy. Weird out. You're not only exposed,
but you're actually transparent. People can not only see your nakedness,
but see beyond you. Yeah. At the time when as
as optics, uh, you know, makes its way into everyday life,
especially for you know, learned individuals. Yeah, you know, you're
you're putting a looking glasses, spectacles on your nose, on
(18:03):
your nose so you can read, etcetera. By the early
seventeenth century, you actually see numerous books with titles that
refer to the looking glass to imply a means of
self discovery. So, as gil speak argues in his work,
you see a melancholic photophobia representing the fear of self discovery,
(18:24):
a kind of techno metaphor for the old adage the
light that sets me free, you can also blind me. Yeah,
So it's not just the fear of being seen through
by others, but the fear of seeing through oneself. Another
thing about the kool aid Man, he's made out of glass.
He seems like the perfect candidate for glass delusion. And
yet what is the other thing that coolant kulaid man
does all the time. He busts through cinder block. So
(18:48):
how does that? How does that work? How I've never
really really questioned it. I was just, you know, I
just completely trusted the media that I was presented with.
Of course, kool Aid Man can bust through a wall,
but he's a glass vessel. What's what's going on here? Well,
he could be some of that special reinforced glass that
you know they use in the in the army vehicles
(19:09):
for windshields and stuff. It doesn't break so easily. I'm
not quite sure why they would invest that technology in
the kool Aid Man. Or maybe it's all about the
Koolaid itself, Like he should break like without the kool
Aid in him, he would have no power. He would
be just that fragile vessel. But Koolaid is so good
and so potent that it can make even the kool
Aid Man of a creature of glass breakthrough that wall. Yeah,
(19:33):
Or it's just that the cinder blocks in the wall
have been made with sand and thus are very very soft.
Maybe that's true. That's true. So another aspect of the
glass delusion that might be interesting to talk about would
be the significance of glass as a technology, because the
bodily fragility delusion is not It did not begin with
(19:54):
the glass delusion. In fact, gil Speak tells us that
there are classical and medieval accounts of earthen where men.
So this is sort of older glass style. The ceramics,
the glazed ceramics that are not quite the type of
clear glass we think about emerging is the windows stuff
of more recent history. But back in the olden days,
(20:15):
you might think you were a clay pot and you
could crack just as easily as a clay pot. Yeah,
and the techno metaphor here, uh, you know it just
it makes perfect sense. You can imagine some you know,
member of an ancient culture and they have this ceramic
pot that they've created, a lot of work has gone
into it, a lot of artistry, and it's a it's
a useful item, but it's also so easily easily shattered,
(20:37):
so that that seems an irresistible metaphor for the human experience.
And as we discussed in our recent episodes on techno religion,
that we can't help but look to our technology and
our man made devices and systems and try to use
those to define ourselves, whether you're talking about you know,
metaphors for you know, agricultural technology or or construction technology
(21:01):
and ancient texts or modern interpretations where we we think
of our mind as a computer or we, you know,
illogically think of our memories as videotapes. Yeah, and very much.
I think there is the same kind of thing we
talked about in techno religion, where ancient metaphors, ancient technological
metaphors are very acceptable to us. Talking about the turning
(21:23):
of a wheel that feels sufficiently ancient and and deep
enough in the human experience to be a metaphor for
something magical and and related to God. But talking about
computers and cell phones that feels crass in the context
of religion. And I think the same thing could could
possibly apply when talking about what delusions are likely to
(21:47):
take hold. Things that are I don't know, have more
of an ancient pedigree seem to be more plausible to us.
Of course, then again, you do hear people saying they
put microchips in my brain. I mean that is modern
delusion some people suffer from. Uh do you know what
I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean we when we
take that that understanding of it and when and we
(22:08):
can easily apply it to uh uh you know, to
the fourteenth century, because this is a time when we
saw an existing technology glass really really developed, really evolved
because because we've had glass for a while, we we
have earliest some of the earliest man made glass objects.
You know, generally beads date back to around UHT b
(22:32):
c E. But around twenty we see the crown glass
blowing technique really kick off. Broadsheet glass emerges earlier in
twelve twenty six, and these really um change what's possible
with glass and the and the sort of applications that
we can we can use. And of course, uh, you
know we're seeing stained glass so up in in churches, uh,
(22:56):
which which has an interesting connection to to mystical thoughts
on glass. Uh. There is a certainly a mysticism of
light at the time, a key factor in the Abbott
Shuger of Saint denis his a twelfth century push for
larger windows and colored glasses in churches. And of course this,
you know that the mysticism light of light here is
(23:17):
you know, pretty obvious. You get into ideas of of
light as this, uh, you know, this metaphor for God's presence,
for God's love, the light of God shining in uh.
And of course optics have always been an area of
scientific inquiry, even in times when when science was you know,
lobbed in there with the philosophical and even magical pursuits.
(23:37):
You have glass, balls, mirror, other optical creations often used
as wards against evil spirits, are used in divination. So, uh,
there's fertile ground there for you. Even as glass begins
to show up everywhere, um, at least in the ritzier
parts of your your your local population centers, there's still
a lot of mysticism, uh, in if not the substance itself,
(24:00):
at least in the fact that it is used as
a convance for light, Yeah, and the fact that it
can be used to manipulate light. And I'm sure once
that happened, that must have been strange to people, for
for whom that was new. Yeah. I mean, look what
a stained glass does to the interior of a cathedral, right,
It transforms the light of day into this, uh, this
phantasmagorical mix of colors. Yeah, and light is something we
(24:24):
don't normally think about being able to manipulate, at least
not in the you know, at your caveman level of technology,
or even at your you know, early Middle ages level
of technology. What are you gonna do with light? I mean,
it's just coming from the sun. And you can make
it with fire, and you can I guess you can
put a shade up. I mean, what's so pervasive now
(24:44):
our optical technology and our manipulation of light that we
don't even think about it, but we are just today
we're just wizards of light. Like just in this room,
look at all the sources of artificial light coming at
us in the way that we're we're manipulating even the
the artificiality of it through various you know, various lenses,
through screens, through different types of bulbs. I mean, it's
(25:06):
it's kind of crazy. So today we live in an
age where we don't even question the magic. But if
we look back to this time where the mat a
lot of the magic is really beginning to come online, Um,
you can see where that would really get into people's
heads and help feed existing tendencies towards delusion. Yeah. Okay,
so we've talked about the images and the ideas that
(25:28):
fed into the glass delusion, but I think we haven't
really talked about the explanation for the glass delusion. And
this is always sort of difficult territory and psychology, where
you're trying to explain what need a psychological delusion answers.
But that is something that people have speculated upon. So
why does the glass lawyer think he is made of glass?
(25:50):
What causes that? Yeah? In this it really ties well
into what's known as terror management theory or t MT,
which is a direct from a cultural anthropologist, Ernest Becker's
efforts to explain the motivational underpinnings of human behavior, which
you know everything. Yeah, I mean that's the key argument
(26:12):
is that like the biggest thing in life is the
is the eventuality of death, and that every knowledge of
it knowledge you have to realize it's coming. It's gonna happen,
It's gonna happen to me, it's gonna happen to everyone
I know and love, UM, and there's nothing I can
do about it. And there's there's very little I can
do to predict when it's going to happen. And so this,
(26:32):
this knowledge of death, this knowledge of impermanence, is so
pervasive that it factors into everything we do, both the
fear of it, the wish to avoid it, and the
desire for immortality, either some sort of literal immortality through
today science, um, religiously through ideas of resurrection, or reincarnation,
(26:54):
or you know, you know less less literal ideas of immortality,
such as I'm gonna I'm gonna be faint, so I'm
gonna really make a name for myself, or have lots
of kids. That's lots of children, or I'm just gonna
I'm gonna make sure that my grave marker is made
out of stone. I'm not made out of stone, but
at least something with my name on it will be
made out of stone, and I will have a curse
(27:16):
carved into it than anyone walking through the graveyard will
tremble to look upon. And so you can really see
where if you look at life through the lens of
terror management theory, you can see how how glass delusion
fits fits neatly into that. You can see. Sure, Yeah,
it's kind of a perfect physical metaphor for realizing the
(27:36):
fragility of one's existence, sort of the metaphorical fragility that
you're always just a moment away, potentially from the end
from being shattered. Yeah, and you know, in this it
reminds me a little bit of a scene from David
Cronenberg's Crash. Did you ever see this one? No, that's
one of the few Cronenberg's I've not seen it. Yeah,
(27:57):
it's I've heard. It's messed up. It's messed up. It's
a weird lick about individuals who fetish eye uh, like
famous lethal car crashes and just car crashes in general. Um.
But there's a scene early on where, if I remember,
a character has been in a pretty pretty catastrophic car
wreck and they have just recovered from their injury. Uh,
(28:19):
and there there's a scene of them riding in the
car and it's kind of a split shot with half
of the half of the scene is uh, is inside
the vehicle, and then half of it is the busy
highway on the other side. And it really does a
great job of, you know, driving home this uh, this
character's realization about the fragility of the human body. Yeah.
There's that quote from the novel Sutree by cormck McCarthy,
(28:41):
which is is great if you wonderful. Yeah, it's very funny,
which is unusual for McCarthy. Uh. That says, what could
a child know of the darkness of God's plan? Or
how flesh is so frail? It is hardly more than
a dream. It's a great line. No, not one of
the funnier moments in the in the book, but no, no,
(29:03):
no contact with watermelons in that one. But no. That
Centre is a wonderful, wonderful book, full of plenty of
Corey McCarthy darkness in places, but also again it's it's
also core McCarthy. It is is most humorous. So one
of the things you might have noticed about pretty much
all of the cases we've mentioned so far is that
they come from a particular time and place. We're talking
(29:24):
about early modern Europe, and that was a particular time
and place in which this delusion seemed to take hold.
It suddenly became popular, and you had glass buddocks everywhere.
But there are some more recent and even some modern
cases of the glass delusion, and I think it would
be really interesting to transition to look at those, yeah,
(29:45):
because because these definitely occur outside of that era of
of glass is an exciting technology, outside of an era
in which you had these clear cultural influences, you know,
regarding the humors and you know, the idea of the
body as some sort of a biblical vessel, etcetera. And
then as we come to the work of psychiatrist Andy
(30:05):
Lemaine Um from Leaden in the Netherlands, and he has
in recent years claim to have uncovered contemporary cases of
glass delusion. Interesting. Yeah, he was apparently lecturing on the topic,
you know, just historically, you know kind of you know,
how how we've been discussing it. Uh, And then he
was approached by a Dutch physician who claimed to have
(30:27):
run across a nineteen thirties case of a woman who
believed her legs and back were made of glass, suspected
by the Dutch physician in question to have have been
part of her particular extreme fear of personal contact. Which
is which is an angle on it that that hadn't
really but we haven't really discussed and maybe as ultimately
(30:49):
a more modern angle to take on it, this gorea
phobia as the root of glass delusion in an individual. Yeah,
it shows up in some of these earlier descriptions about
people who who feared being approached by others less to
those people shatter them. But those older cases really do
seem to have more to do with death. It seems
(31:09):
to me like they fear all kinds of mechanical and
physical trauma, you know, being afraid of roof tiles falling
on you, or of being jostled too much in the
carriage or something which you're both kind of fears of technology.
That's interesting, Yeah, but but this is strictly talking about
personal contact. And typically when you're thinking about what would
break glass, you don't think about somebody's hands. You think about,
(31:33):
you know, dropping it on the floor or something like that.
But I can definitely see how this type of glass
delusion could come into play as well. Yeah, and then
you know, following this, another doctor brought him an additional
case from a different hospital from around nineteen but it
(31:53):
but but the really key moment in uh Leman's research
came when a young patient showed up at his own
hospital claiming to be made out of glass. So, of
course he did what you know that you would expect.
He said, well, we'll come on in, I will get
you a nice cushion to set on, and we will
talk about your glass delusion because I really want to
find out what's at the root of it. And and
(32:13):
he made sure uh not to lead the questions too much,
not not to immediately presume that it had to do
with with with terror management theory and a fear of
death and impermanence, etcetera. Say, here are the symptoms you
should be experiencing if you have glass delusion. Yeah, I
mean this guy's this guy's a pro. He knows what
he's doing, so um it. In questioning this patient, it
(32:35):
emerged that the patient's feelings were similar to the way
we see through the glass in a window, observing everything beyond,
has been not seeing the glass itself. So it was
it's it's tied in this almost a fear of invisibility. Yeah,
so not just being exposed, but but of being inconsequential. Yeah,
(32:59):
like I'm just not not only am I just another person,
but I'm a person that everyone just sees through, Like
I only take up space, but not in people's minds,
not in their actual perceptions of reality. That's fascinating. Yeah,
I think that the quote from from from the individual
as they were as they're looking out a window at
(33:19):
the vista beyond, they say, that's me. I'm there and
I'm not there, like the glass in a window. Yeah.
So in the right up we read of this incident,
they described how Lemayne found out from this patient that
the patient had been in an accident, and following the accident,
his family had been very overprotective of him, and that
(33:42):
this glass delusion served as what they called a distance regulator.
It was an attempt to have a sort of self
controlled level of distance and privacy from all of the
people leaning in on his life. So it might not
be that a person necessarily fears being in con sequential.
It might be that they desire to be less the
(34:03):
focus of other people's attention, which which serves to bring
us back around, interestingly enough to the young eleven year
old King Charles, right, because here's this individual who's at
the center of all these machinations and concerns about the
future of a kingdom. Uh, it's it's you know, we're
speculating here, but it seems like he would be very
(34:24):
easy for him to feel in consequential and overmanaged and overtouched. Yeah.
I think that's a good thought. And then, of course
there's also the possibility that the glass delusion has something
to do with fears of effacement and social humiliation. Yeah,
and this ties into the into the idea that we
live in this modern age where it's so easy to
have anxieties about our personal fragility, but also transparency, especially
(34:49):
of our personal space. Um So this again ties back
into that idea that that I am I'm not only
am a made of glass, but I am transparent and
I don't matter. I'm just a transparent vessel in this
world of transparent vessels. You can almost think of that
as being a physical metaphor for how some of us
exist in the online era, right in the era of retweets,
(35:12):
where where ideas and content often just kind of flow
through you and back out. That's where it's so easy
to be more connected than ever before to the people
in your life, but also more isolated. Yeah, I'm sharing
what I have seen. I do not produce my own light.
So I wonder if that means that we could see
(35:34):
more cases of glass delusion. Yeah. I wondered about what
the future of glass delusion might be since we've we've
sort of seen that it might have some relationship to
the development of glass technology throughout history. Like in the
earthenware age you have the earthenware delusion, in the clear
glass age, you have the glass delusion. What could the
(35:54):
future material based delusion be? Like will we ever have
the carbon nanotubes delusion? I don't know exactly what that
would be. I was just trying to think are there
any future materials people could feel like they were. Well,
one of the things I thought of was translucent concrete.
Have you read about this, No, I have none. Yeah,
it's concrete building material that has embedded elements like that.
(36:17):
It might be things like optical fibers that allow the
transmission of light. So the kool Aid Man could be
translucent concrete. That's why he's so strong, but you can
still see through him. Ah see he was. He's a
visitor from the future, bringing to us the joys, the wonders,
the holy miracle. Yes, uh, this this meta material. I
(36:37):
think that's something that's actually interesting. If you wanted to
think about a future in which we do not have
such fears about fragility, but we still have the fears
about transparency, maybe there will be the translucent concrete delusion
where we we still have all of these ideas about
who sees me, who sees into me, who sees through me?
(36:57):
Do I exist? Do I take up space? Do I
flect light? But people aren't so concerned about their own death.
I mean, this could be if we get the kind
of Aubrey de Gray future where where the ultimate bad
ending is not a physical death but just a bad
social outcome. You know this since this brings to mind
(37:18):
the fact that we do see quantum mechanics and also
theories regarding the multiverse um factor into a lot of
our considerations about self and where we are in our life. Uh.
And a lot of this, I feel is is you know,
comes from our consumption of media that employs those concepts.
Is there is there like a comic book or a
(37:39):
sci fi usage of meta materials that it could have
this impact on everyone? I don't know. I'm sure there is,
and I just can't think of it right now. Yeah,
Like I'm trying to think if there's a if there's
a comic book character who really makes use of some
sort of meta material or special material, um, clay Face maybe, yeah,
(38:01):
oh yeah, that's sort of like the fear of being Well,
it's always a metaphor and whatever the material is, it's
always a metaphor for your personal hangouts. Because clay Face
is what he's an actor, who's uh you know, is
he really anybody inside? Right? He can assume all these forms,
but he himself is formless. Um. You know. It also
brings the crypt kryptonite, which isn't a material, but it
(38:24):
is at an element. But we do see that used
a lot of Someone will say, oh, well, that is
my kryptonite. That is the thing that in and of
itself can bring about my downfall. So you know, here's
a thought that might be interesting or might be kind
of dumb. I'll let you be the judge. One thing
I was thinking about was that beings with partially glass
of biology might not be unthinkable in the universe. Because
(38:49):
here was my reasoning, and and this isn't original to me.
I've heard people express this idea before. Earth Animals like
humans are carbon based life forms, So we inhale oxygen,
which is O two, and then we exhale the waste product,
carbon dioxide, which is c O two, because we're carbon based,
if it were possible to have a silicon based organism,
(39:10):
and I have no idea if that's possible or not,
but it's an idea that comes up in debates about astrobiology.
And it breathed oxygen like us, would it inhale O
two and then exhale silicon dioxide the same way we
exhale carbon dioxide, because silicon dioxide is the main constituent
of glass. And if that's possible that is a legitimately
(39:33):
horrific space dragon that instead of flame breath has glass breath,
breath of glass. I like it though, it uh, you know,
brings to mind just last week we were talking about
Stephen King's Beach World in nineteen seventy short story about uh,
about individual's landing. I think it's like two humans and
(39:55):
an android, or a crew of humans and androids that
crash on a desert world. And at first it seems lifeless,
but of course you wouldn't have a short story if
there wasn't something out there. So the silicon sand dunes
sort of become sentient and then hypnotize one of the guys. Yeah. Yeah,
so it was pretty creepy. It's pretty creepy. Uh, it's
it's one of the great early King stories. And uh yeah,
(40:17):
you have silicon based life in the form of these
this you know, collective sand entity. But if that kind
of life form existed on beach World, then perhaps there's
on the other side of Beach World there is a
city where you have glass beings walking around, or a
glass breathing dragon, glass breathing dragons. Now they are all
kinds of examples in fiction of people shattering. This is,
(40:41):
in fact, I think, a very popular trope for some reason.
Oh yeah, one of the big ones. I feel that
really that really kicked off a lot of it. Of course,
as in Terminator to where you have the scene where
the liquid metal TEA one thousand is frozen solid with
the liquid nitrogen and then shattered. Yeah he's made brittle. Yeah.
So you see continuations of that trope, and we're trying
(41:03):
to think of a number of these. Time cop has
a couple of kills, it's great. My mind immediately went
to Jason X because there is a scene in Jason
X where Jason murders an unfortunate young lady by putting
her face in some liquid nitrogen that freezes it and
then shattering her face on a countertop. And then and
(41:25):
then Horizon there's a frozen corpse that breaks apart. Mortal Kombat.
Oh yeah, Zero does that to you, Donne. He freezes
you and then punches you to shatter you. Yeah, yeah,
sure does. And then uh and then of course, like
Mirror Creatures, there's the the Young Sherlock Holmes movie which
involved a stained glass night, or at least the the
(41:45):
hallucination of a stone of a stained glass night killing somebody. Um,
I seem to recall that both Krull and Barbarella had
minions that shatter into into shards when they're killed. You
linked in the notes for this episode a wonderful scene
from the movie Warlock three that I watched late at
night last night, right before I went to bed. Julian
(42:07):
sands right, and he was he's he's wonderful, And yeah,
he turns a woman into glass and then shatters her,
not with the most pristine of special effects. Everybody still doesn't,
so God bless him. Um. Likewise, Uh, there's a you know,
there's a scene in Labyrinth that involves a reality shattering
into glass. Pretty much anything that you could run across
(42:29):
that involves Medusa or a gorgon, there's no if you're
gonna turn an individual into stone, you also need to
shatter somebody that has been turned into stone. Yeah, even
in an age where the glass delusion might not be
a common delusion for people to actually suffer from, it
is still a very common image in our imagination for
some reason. Yeah, because you have things in our life
(42:51):
that are beautiful, well crafted, in pristine and we attach
a lot of value to them, and they are so
easily trashed, they're so easily bro can it don nothing
and made made completely useless, made May you know their
their beauty transformed into just ugliness. And we can't help
but see our own reflection and see our own doom.
(43:12):
Uh in those examples. All right, So there you have it,
mirror delusion. You know, a brief journey through the history
of mirror delusion, where it came from and how it
it really hasn't gone away? Uh, you know out certainly
the delusion itself is a psychiatric manifestation. You do see
very few cases off today, but the the the the idea,
(43:33):
the concept, the tying of of of impermanence to shattered
objects continues to reson it. Yeah, we'll always have Mortal Kombat.
We will, We always will. All right. Hey, in the meantime,
do you want to check out more episodes of Stuff
to Blow Your Mind? Go to Stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. That's the mothership. That's where you'll find uh,
all the blog posts, all the podcast episodes, all the videos.
(43:54):
Links out to our social media accounts because you can
find us on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, or Google Plus. And hey,
the landing page for this episode will include links to
some on site materials that are related, as well as
to a couple of offsite sources. If you want to
explore this topic further, and if you want to tell
us about your favorite scene in a movie where somebody
(44:15):
gets turned into glass or some other brittle material and
then shattered, or if you want to tell us about
an interesting delusion where people thought their body was made
of some foreign substance or material, you can email us
at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
(44:35):
how stuff works dot com
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