Somatoparaphrenia in a patient with schizophrenia

Abstract

The term somatoparaphrenia was firstly used by Gerstmann to describe a form of asomatognosia in which unawareness of ownership is accompanied by delusional misidentification and/or confabulation. This is a rare phenomenon and the few published case reports showed an association of this psychopathological entity with brain-damage. We present a patient with schizophrenia who believed his right arm and right foot were not his own. According to his delusion of foreign ownership, his foot didn’t belong to him because it was a “big foot only suited for work” and his right arm belonged to Maria, a woman from his neighbourhood. Remarkably, no organic causes were found to exist. To our knowledge, this is one of the rare cases of schizophrenia in which somatoparaphrenia can be identified. We further elaborate on the phenomenology of this particular patient.