ABSTRACT
The delusional world, inspired partly by the logics of the unconscious, appears as a kind of philosophy of life. “Madness” is a word that has been around for a very long time, and has been differently expressed as insanity, lunacy, mental derangement, and “melancholy”. In his sixteenth-century Treatise of Melancholie, Timothy Bright wrote of mental disorders which begin with the presence of melancholic symptoms. An interest in psychosis was present in Sigmund Freud’s work as a medical student. Freud’s paper on the antithetical meaning of primal words runs, therefore, parallel to Matte Blanco’s notion of the symmetrical quality of the unconscious as a structural reality. Melanie Klein’s clinical experience greatly contributed to our understanding of a living unconscious with its own rules and its metaphysical implications. Psychotic patients are preoccupied with deep metaphysical issues. This universe follows some of the principles of the unconscious in opposition to some conscious principles concerning communication with others and the reality principle.
