The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: "The Dog Beneath the Skin"

But it was the exaltation of smell which really transformed his world...

‘I had dreamt I was a dog—it was an olfactory dream—and now I awoke to an infinitely redolent world—a world in which all other sensations, enhanced as they were, paled before smell.'

‘I had dreamt I was a dog—it was an olfactory dream—and now I awoke to an infinitely redolent world—a world in which all other sensations, enhanced as they were, paled before smell.'

‘I had never had much of a nose for smells before, but now I distinguished each one instantly—and I found each one unique, evocative, a whole world.’

‘I went into the clinic, I sniffed like a dog, and in that sniff recognised, before seeing them, the twenty patients who were there. Each had his own olfactory physiognomy, a smell-face, far more vivid and evocative, more redolent, than any sight face.’

He could recognise every street, every shop, by smell—he could find his way around New York, infallibly, by smell.

He experienced a certain impulse to sniff and touch everything (‘It wasn’t really real until I felt it and smelt it’) but suppressed this, when with others, lest he seem inappropriate.

Smell pleasure was intense—smell displeasure, too—but it seemed to him less a world of mere pleasure and displeasure than a whole aesthetic, a whole judgment, a whole new significance, which surrounded him.

Somewhat intellectual before, and inclined to reflection and abstraction, he now found thought, abstraction and categorisation, somewhat difficult and unreal, in view of the compelling immediacy of each experience.

Somewhat intellectual before, and inclined to reflection and abstraction, he now found thought, abstraction and categorisation, somewhat difficult and unreal, in view of the compelling immediacy of each experience.

Rather suddenly, after three weeks, this strange transformation ceased—his sense of smell, all his senses, returned to normal; he found himself back, with a sense of mingled loss and relief, in his old world of pallor, sensory faintness, non-concreteness and abstraction.

Excitation of this, by whatever means, produces heightened emotionalism and an intensification of the senses. The entire subject, with its intriguing ramifications, has been explored in great detail by David Bear (1979).

He has no regrets—but he is occasionally nostalgic: ‘That smell-world, that world of redolence,’ he exclaims. ‘So vivid, so real! It was like a visit to another world, a world of pure perception, rich, alive, self-sufficient, and full. If only I could go back sometimes and be a dog again!’

Freud wrote on several occasions of man’s sense of smell as being a ‘casualty’, repressed in growing up and civilisation with the assumption of an upright posture and the repression of primitive, pre-genital sexuality.

Specific (and pathological) enhancements of smell have indeed been reported as occurring in paraphilia, fetishism, and allied perversions and regressions.

Specific (and pathological) enhancements of smell have indeed been reported as occurring in paraphilia, fetishism, and allied perversions and regressions.

What we see, if nothing else, is the universality of inhibition, even at the most elemental perceptual level: the need to inhibit what Head regarded as primordial and full of feeling-tone, and called 'protopathic’, in order to allow the emergence of the sophisticated, categorising, affectless ‘epicritic’.

What we see, if nothing else, is the universality of inhibition, even at the most elemental perceptual level: the need to inhibit what Head regarded as primordial and full of feeling-tone, and called 'protopathic’, in order to allow the emergence of the sophisticated, categorising, affectless ‘epicritic’.

I have recently encountered a sort of corollary of this case—a gifted man who sustained a head injury, severely damaging his olfactory tracts (these are very vulnerable in their long course across the anterior fossa) and, in consequence, entirely losing his sense of smell.

There was an acute sense of loss, and an acute sense of yearning, a veritable osmalgia: a desire to remember the smell-world to which he had paid no conscious attention, but which, he now felt, had formed the very ground base of life.

There was an acute sense of loss, and an acute sense of yearning, a veritable osmalgia: a desire to remember the smell-world to which he had paid no conscious attention, but which, he now felt, had formed the very ground base of life.

And then, some months later, to his astonishment and joy, his favourite morning coffee, which had become ‘insipid’, started to regain its savour.

Tentatively he tried his pipe, not touched for months, and here too caught a hint of the rich aroma he loved.

But after testing him minutely, using a ‘double-blind’ technique, his doctor said: ‘No, I’m sorry, there’s not a trace of recovery. You still have a total anosmia. Curious though that you should now “smell” your pipe and coffee...’

What seems to be happening—and it is important that it was only the olfactory tracts, not the cortex, which were damaged—is the development of a greatly enhanced olfactory imagery, almost, one might say, a controlled hallucinosis, so that in drinking his coffee, or lighting his pipe—situations normally and previously fraught with associations of smell—he is now able to evoke or re-evoke these, unconsciously, and with such intensity as to think, at first, that they are ‘real’.