ABSTRACT
In John Nash’s case, the capacity for scientific intuition and for delusion coexisted during the psychotic episode, without excessive mutual interference. A sense of pleasure in intuition arises when the magmatic field of phenomena and perceptions comes to be organized around a figure that emerges from a ground, a figure that arranges all the elements present within a higher, meaningful order. Even chance words spoken in the analytic dialogue that trigger associations to the traumatic event arouse the patient’s terror, owing to the sudden invasive feeling of not remembering the event but of reliving it in the present. Delusion, therefore, persists as an indelibly fixed trauma that tends to be impossible to work through and can never be forgotten. The characteristic feature of the psychotic state is not projection on to the world or curiosity, qualities typical of intuitive imagination, but psychic withdrawal and use of the organs of perception to construct artificial states of well being.
