Psychological Background

Abstract

The phenomenon of delusion is too obvious to have ever been discovered.¹ It was usually ascribed to either supernatural causes or to derangement. Before the French Revolution² no mental illness was taken seriously³, as the first to treat mental illness as an illness, respecting its bearer as a human being, were the clinicians who attempted to implement the philosophy of the Enlightenment.⁴ Only about a century later, Kraepelin took the phenomena of mental illness, including the varieties of delusion, seriously enough to describe and to diagnose some of them as paranoia.⁵ Like everyone else before Freud, he too was convinced that brain damage (or organic cause) was the basis of every mental illness. (This is the meaning of the 19th century materialistic slogan. “No psychosis without neurosis”, where “psychosis” means mental damage to non physical entities and “neurosis” means physical damage to such physical entities as nerves and nerve centres⁶.) Nevertheless, Kraepelin miraculously noticed the paradoxically logical strength of the deluded mind. He tried to explain this by the observation that the deranged mind possesses some defective faculties but some undamaged ones, perhaps with the improvement of the latter to compensate for loss in the former. He could not relate the defective qualities to any brain damage, but he was able to pinpoint the defects; and we are not yet able to improve on him in this respect. What he said was very briefly as follows: The paranoic’s logic is perfect; his premises are false. To use his own oft quoted words, paranoia is “the insiduous development of a permanent unshakeable delusional system from inner causes in which clarity and order of thinking, willing, and action, are completely preserved.”⁷