ABSTRACT
Jonathan Swift was perhaps the first author to describe the mental disease known today as "schizophrenia". The kingdom of Laputa-Balnibarbi, described in his famous novel Gulliver’s Travels, appears today, in the light of Eugene Minkowski's psychopathological theories. Geometrism, practical maladjustment, reification of the “proper universe”, a morbid obsession with pianning and coprophagy constitute the complete symptoms of schizophrenia. The kingdom of Balnibarbi is obsessed with the idea of planning. It seems that Swift lucidly foresaw one of the typical features that will reappear, centuries later, in the ideology of Stalinist Russia. An “obsession with the possible” has been detected in some cases of schizoid psychology, as it was pointed out by Swift in the collective psychology in Laputa-Balnibarbi’s inhabitants. For the psychopathologist, Swift’s work presents a literary confirmation of the sometimes controversial nosological reality of schizophrenia as pictured by Minkowski and others.
