We have all slept sometimes with someone who has become a stranger to you. And even with your enemy. That is within the vicissitudes of a more or less conventional love life. But we are not aware of what a traumatic experience it must be to go to sleep with a Boyfriend and wake up with a Private Individual. Terrifying situation, for example, having him eating breakfast in front of you, at the kitchen table, you knowing that your Boyfriend is not a Boyfriend but an Individual and him believing that you still think that he is a Boyfriend.
The closest takes us to the realm of science fiction, with The Invasion of the Ultracorps, that terrifying anti-communist novel by Jack Finney made into a successful film twice –Don Siegel (1956) and Philip Kaufman (1978)–. As you may remember, some seeds escape from a distant planet and reach Earth, where they grow and bloom. The action begins when a friend of the protagonist, a Health Inspector (it would have been great if she had been from the Treasury, but Finney perhaps lacked future vision), tells him that her husband is behaving strangely. She is his Husband, she seems like his Husband, but there is something strange that makes him distant, strange, unusual. Of course, he is right. And her husband is already a pod born from those extraterrestrial seeds. He has been possessed. He looks like Husband, but he is Vaina.
Maybe that's like discovering that your Boyfriend is suddenly a Private Individual. Because a Particular is never a Anyone or a That. It is not the husband who returns from the war and seems different because we would enter the realm of sleeping with a Stranger. Not a husband who has become boring and stupid. An Individual is not a Boyfriend, in the same way that a Husband is not an alien plant. Bob Dylan resonates: you lie like a Boyfriend, you love like a Boyfriend, you phone like a Boyfriend, but you deceive like a Private Individual.
