Folie a Deux

            Recently, we started watching the play, "Waiting for Godot" in my English class. The entire plot of this play is that two characters have to wait for a person, as the title suggests. This concept of waiting is pretty common in our day-to-day life, as everyone has to wait for some event to occur in their life. Didi and Gogo, the main characters, often try to pass time by having repetitive conversations and interacting with two other characters, Pozzo and Lucky. During their interactions, my English teacher proposed something pretty interesting: were Pozzo and Lucky real, or were they made up by Didi and Gogo?

            When I first thought about it, I didn't really think that Pozzo and Lucky could be made-up characters. After all, two people couldn't have the exact same hallucination at the same time, right? To my surprise, they actually can. I actually came across an article that describes a phenomenon called Folie a Deux (or Shared Psychotic Disorder) which is defined as a delusion that two or more people in a close bond experience. It usually appears between family members but can also appear in other close relationships. There are many variations of this disorder, but the one that is the most relevant to Gogo and Didi is Folie simultanee, where both people experience the same delusion at the same time. One of the key risk factors highly emphasized in this article is the length of relationships and long, continuous social interactions. We know that Gogo and Didi, as they have waited and will probably keep waiting for Godot for an unknown amount of time, have spent an exceptional period together, in the middle of a random desert. Therefore, it is probable that Gogo and Didi both suffer from this condition, stimulated by their close proximity for long lengths of time. 

            My discovery of this condition really opened up the seeming unreliable nature of the play itself even further, as Pozzo and Lucky, who may not be real, are described as actual people that interact with Gogo and Didi. If this is true, is Godot, the person they are waiting for, even real? Or is it another common delusion that Gogo and Didi are facing? Maybe the illusion about waiting for Godot represents another type of the Folie a Deux, called Folie induite, where one person induces psychosis on another. In the play, Didi constantly has to remind Gogo why they are waiting. I originally thought that Gogo's memory was just bad. But perhaps Didi has adopted a delusion that they are waiting for Godot, which he has repeatedly reinforced in Gogo, making Gogo believe the same as him.  

            I can't wait to see what happens next.