We describe a case of a brain-damaged patient who had a peculiar bodily illusion which could not be labelled an hallucination but seemed somatognosically and phenomenologically similar to the phantom limb without amputation. The patient, who showed left hemiplegia, felt a third upper limb (without seeing it) which he himself defined as "spare." The spare limb was not deformed; it could be moved and controlled by the patient, and there was no sensation of pain. The patient did not show psychopathological or cognitive disorders. A possible interpretation of the phenomenon is as a "phantom movement" of the paralysed limb: the mental representation of the movement of the limb was dissociated from the bodily representation of his own limb and so was still present in his consciousness despite the paralysis.
| Symptom | Subdomain | Domain |
|---|---|---|
| delusion | Reality Monitoring | Cognitive Systems |
| supernumerary limb | Sense of Self | Cognitive Systems |
| visual hallucinations | Reality Monitoring | Cognitive Systems |
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