On the Genesis and Dynamics of Inventor's Delusion1

The nucleus of the paranoidal system of the shoemaker of Görlitz, Jakob Böhme, is the centrum naturæ or Nature's wheel, composed of seven djins inhabiting springs of water or the sap of vegetation, and acting in and upon the cosmos; this represents a projection of the subject's mental processes into creation with unmistakably sexual symbolism. Of three of these djins of sap, Mercurius, Sal and Sulphur, which the mystic took over from the natural philosophy of Paracelsus, we interpreted on a previous2 occasion the first, Mercurius (i.e. quicksilver) as an image of mobile, living nature produced by the hard spike; the second, Sal, as sharp sexual desire, and the third, Sulphur, as woman's fear of the raging and the breaking of the spike.

The explanations of a paranoiac inventor, König, treated in Königs-felden, again drew our attention to this significance of mercury. All his constructions, which he described as 'perpetueno mobilletes', as self-driven machines for power-development and weight-regulation, mostly consisting of two equal parts coupled together, were remarkable for the fact that their driving force was supplied by spherical, paired weights. These weights contained hollow spaces or were connected with others of a tubular form. Within them was very fusible lead or mercury. The ready interpretation that this was a symbolic representation of the testes, with the sperm, or nature, as he called it, flowing out of them, was, however, insufficient in the case of this man completely to explain the evolution of his engines. As his first and most important invention he described a velocipede which was worked solely by the weight of the rider without a treadle mechanism. Now it happened that owing to an accident in his boyhood the patient had a shortened and atrophied leg. His crippled condition prompted the desire to compensate for his imperfect powers of locomotion by means of marvellous