delusion of being someone one is not theme

A character is portrayed as having the crazy delusion that they are someone they are not. Typically this happens when a person believes themself to be someone famous, like Jesus or Napoleon.

Notes

This theme is typically not applicable in fantastical stories where magic or technology is used to alter a person's mind in such a way that it arguably has been transformed into the mind of that person they now think they are.

9 total · 4 major · 5 minor

StoryLevelMotivation
ahh3x11 major The all-female society medical professionals tried to convince Jane that her memories of a two gender world were all some sort of elaborate delusion.
ahp4x32 major The viewer is led to believe that Howard was suffering from the delusion of thinking he was a Martian named Yangan. But it is later revealed that he, in fact, was. Alfred Hitchcock pretended the same in the epilogue.
movie: KPAX (2001) major The story centered around Prot being institutionalized after claiming to be an extraterrestrial from the planet K-PAX.
tftc1989e4x07 major The going hypothesis up until the end was that the strange woman, Nora, suffered from a kind of delusion that she was also the problematic child.
ahh2x01 minor The old (mostly bedridden) woman suffered from various peculiar delusions. She thought she was a famous person, had cavorted with famous people, and later that she was pregnant and had been so for five years.
ahp5x23 minor It was revealed at the end that Judy may have been under the delusion that she was a dog.
futurama3x11 minor A Bicorne hat wearing Bender utter the phrase "Je suis Napoleon" in jest while visiting Fry in the robot lunatic asylum.
rd1988e8x01 minor The ship psychiatrist thought Kryten was crazy in insisting he was a robot.
tftc1989e3x03 minor Lou's mother thought herself Eleanor Roosevelt. [Eleanor Roosevelt]