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psychopathology, represented by authors such as Kurt Schneider, [10] regards this
kind of phenomena as delirious perceptions.
There are other forms of rationality that cannot strictly be considered classical
either but that do not go as far as to be psychotic: the discourse of dreams, of certain
literary works (such as the surreal) or of magical thinking.
Then there is the famous Shakespeare line: “
Though this be madness, yet there
is method in it.
”(
Hamlet
, act II, scene II). To say that there is method in madness
is like saying that there is a certain coherent structure to it, a certain rationality.
Though it may not be classical. Though it may be poetic, that is to say associative.
Poets are not mad. At least not all of them. But between poetic and psychotic
discourse there is a common element: they are two different ways of applying as-
sociative rationality. It is known that in the early days of 1889, as he sank into the
madness from which he would not return, Nietzsche wrote a series of letters signed
“The Crucified”, but also “Dionysius”, in which he identified with various famous
figures (including God himself) and claimed to have attended his own funeral twice.
([8], pp. 173-176.) A few days later Nietzsche entered the asylum. He had lost his
sanity through wanting to be both Nietzsche and God, through trying to be both alive
and dead at the same time. It is clear that Nietzsche had gone mad but it could also
be said that there was method in his madness, that his delirium could be regarded
as the product of another kind of rationality and analyzed in terms of this. ([4], pp.
197-201.)
There is nothing strange in itself about the structure of the thought of Cabalerio's
patient (or that of Nietzsche, who collapsed in Turin): the leap from a broken bottle
to one's own life being broken or from a wine stain to a blood stain is nothing more
than an association of ideas based on a relation of analogy.
We could regard them as two simple metaphors, if it were not for a series of ac-
companying circumstances (the absolute certainty with which the meaning imposes
itself, its imperviousness to any kind of reasoning, its extravagance, its idiosyn-
cratic nature) that lead to the conclusion that there is something more behind these
metaphorical analogies.
The patient was a psychotic because, unlike what would have happened with his
neighbors, the broken bottle did not merely symbolise but was his broken life and
the wine stain was not a metaphor for a blood stain but rather the identities of the
wine and the blood were confused. For him the wine was the same as the blood, it
absolutely was blood, and this confusion of two distinct identities is what allows us
to state that he was not creating a metaphor but suffering delirium. In his madness
he has lost control over the mechanisms of analogical association, but they still
have a certain coherence that makes them intelligible, a coherence that arranges the
relationships between signifiers (image of broken bottle, image of red liquid) and
significances (destroyed life, spilt blood).
It is possible that, if the madness progresses, the coherence and relative com-
plexity of this structure may fall apart to leave only a simple association of sig-
nifiers without any comprehensible significance, signifiers that would continue to
stem from a mechanism of analogical association but would now be nothing more
than a series of similar sounds.
