The changing world. Considerations on some historical aspects of the problem of diagnosing schizophrenia

Abstract

The author explores the historical process which has led to the formulation of the birth theory in the context of research which began in the 1960s. Of particular importance for Massimo Fagioli’s discovery of the disappearance fantasy and the annulment drive was the fact that he took on the tradition of psychopathological thinking of phenomenological and existentialist derivation, allowing him to save the concept of delirious perception from the ambiguous definitions proffered by Kurt Schneider and Ferdinando Barison who failed to distinguish between interpretation and delirious perception, between the awareness of meaning in a normal context and in a pathological context. On the basis of the discovery of the annulment drive as the generating nucleus of psychosis a particular diagnostic procedure was formulated. The psychiatrist detects a fracture within the therapeutic relationship, a fault from which the patients’ catastrophic past experiences emerge. The discontinuity is not something that can be seen through an anamnestic research, typical of Jaspers, Binswanger and Bleuler, but emerges in the reality of the transference as an unexpected and sudden event.