ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on psychoanalyst who produces a tragedy, where a sharp distinction is maintained between the delirium of the psychotic patient and the theorizing of the psychiatrist. It deals with a more or less systematic comparison between delire and theory: a whole tradition has stemmed from Freud's acknowledgement of Schreber's powers. Delire, even if it is revealed as containing a nucleus of truth and as having the same structure as a theory, remains a symptom. And yet delire must be clearly distinguished from normal language. In the psychoanalytic account of delire, with a contradiction: delire is both delirium in the medical sense, a non-creative and repetitive flow of words, and a medium for truthful insights, a form of theory. The true locus for delire is literary fiction. Delire, then, is a form of defence: the paranoiac reconstructs the world through his fiction, so as to continue living in it.