On the Psychopathology of Persecutory Delusions

Abstract

Jaspers' (1963) concept of delusions proper is founded on the fact that patients suffering from schizophrenic and paranoiac psychoses experience these mental events as ego alien and completely unlike previous modes of thinking, feeling and perceiving. This disruption in the continuity and quality of mental life has been taken to indicate that, in contrast to delusion-like ideas, delusions proper do not have psychological antecedents. Such a view has never been acceptable to psychiatrists who favour a developmental approach to mental pathology. According to Minkowski (1927), Katan (1954) and Ey (1969), whose writings are based on Jackson (1894), Freud (1911) and Ribot (1920), it is possible to understand and resolve this disturbance in the continuity of the content of the mental life of those who succumb to schizophrenic and paranoiac psychoses.