Victor Khrisanfovich Kandinsky

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Victor Khrisanfovich Kandinsky (1849-1889) was a Russian physician, and was uncle to famed artist Vassily Kandinsky. He was born in Siberia into a family of successful businessmen.

In 1877 as a military physician in the Balkans during the Russo-Turkish War, he began experiencing mood swings and hallucinations. Kandinsky performed self-diagnosis, and he referred to his mental condition as Primäre Verrücktheit; which has been translated to mean a "schizophrenic-like state". In 1885 Kandinsky published a book written in German on "pseudo-hallucinations" in which he describes and details hallucinations largely based on his personal experiences. In 1889, he took his own life by taking an overdose of morphine.

In a monograph published posthumously in 1890, Kandinsky described a condition which involved being alienated from one's personal mental processes, combined with delusions of being physically and mentally influenced by external forces. The syndrome he described is now known as Kandinsky-Clérambault syndrome, named along with French psychiatrist Gaëtan Gatian de Clerambault.

[edit] References

• Origins of the Kandinsky-Clérambault syndrome