ABSTRACT
The author uses this novella to illustrate Dostoevsky’s remarkable understanding of the experience of madness: the psychic collapse, the breaking down of all defence mechanisms, the abolition of the relation to time, and the dispersion of the being in space. De Macedo points out that inadequate knowledge of the unconscious, or a poor understanding of Freud can make reading of this text incomprehensible for an expert literary critic, or for psychoanalysts who try to apply the Freudian theory of neurosis mechanically to psychotic phenomena.
