Book excerpt: "This book focuses on psychiatric phenomena that are typically regarded as rare and unusual. These phenomena include the delusional misidentification syndromes, various abnormalities of perception such as Charles Bonnet syndrome, multimodal perceptual experiences such as synaesthesia, abnormalities of the self such as autoscopy and abnormalities of experience of the body such as Côtard syndrome. These phenomena, sometimes termed syndromes, are of great theoretical and conceptual interest to psychiatrists precisely because they are often discrete abnormalities that transcend diagnostic categories but yet allow for the opportunity to carefully examine and elucidate fundamental aspects of abnormal phenomena"--