History
The syndrome was first described at a symposium on lifestyle drugs and aesthetic medicine (Brosig 2000, Brosig et al. 2001, Euler 2003 et al.). The name alludes to Oscar Wilde’s famous novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and the 1945 film made from it, in which the protagonist as a handsome young man looks at a just-painted portrait of himself and wishes that it, rather than he, could grow old. He is then unable to mature, and "gives his soul away" in order to resist time and nature. Wilde's artistic condensation in the form of the Dorian Gray portrait both cites and transgresses narcissistic mirror motives, and eternal beauty and the process of aging and maturation are represented by the person and mirror dyad. Wilde's artistic creation serves as a background for the clinical description of the syndrome.
Read more about this topic: Dorian Gray Syndrome
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“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.”
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