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This paper was presented at the Twentieth Congress of Psychoanalysts of Romance Languages, held in Brussels, February 1958.
It is difficult to do justice in an abstract to this lengthy and excellent study. A bibliography is appended and the authors refer to Freud's study of the Schreber case and most of the work on delusions published since.
The delusion is a creation that obeys the patient's need to re-create those objects that he fears he has in fantasy destroyed. The patient, through the delusion, attempts to restore a rational order and a relation with the world. But such deliriums allow the patient no object relation tolerable to him. The authors make no attempt to define delusion but prefer to attempt to understand its construction, which is, in fact, the essential problem in understanding the psychoses.