The idea underlying all this – and which can be seen in nascent form in Einar Wegener’s feeling that he had a ‘woman inside’ – is ‘dualism’. This is the belief that the immaterial psyche and the vessel that houses it are separate and of different kinds. The best-known proponent of this was the seventeenth-century French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes, who saw mind as pre-eminent over matter.
