ABSTRACT
This chapter points out the departure from Sigmund Freud's original theoretical contributions; in the psychoanalytic writingfrom his conceptions of psychosis to then take account of the various developments after Freud. In its beginnings psychoanalysis was a psychology of the drives which had set itself the task of exploring the vicissitudes of the drives; and so this applied to its investigation of psychosis as well. Freud understood delusion as an attempt at restitution, a process of reconstruction. The concept of 'narcissism' that Freud developed in 1914, once again highlights the psychotic patient's withdrawal of the libido from the external objects and its subsequent retreat into the ego. The capacity to form and use symbols is only possible on the basis of accepting that psychic reality and external reality are not identical. The capacity to use and understand language is based on a fundamental property of language: its metaphorical function.
