You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
It happens rather rarely that the psychiatrist reading a novel feels that the essential problems of clinical psychiatry are treated with insight or understanding. It is true that the great masterpieces of literature reveal important psychological insight. Shakespeare and Dostoievsky have not only carefully described psychiatric cases but showed an understanding of their problems which surpassed that of contemporary psychiatrists. Hamlet is the picture of a doubting individual, who caught in his infantile attitudes, does not dare to act. Lear is a good description of a senile dementia. The psychiatric diagnosis of Ophelia remains in doubt although the clinical picture of an acute psychosis with features of dissociation and confusion is well described. The insight of Dostoievsky into the psychology of epileptics and schizophrenics is astonishing. We may suspect that the deeper insight of the poets is partially due to the fact that they see the human problems as such and are not concerned with the clinical problems. They are also justified in their belief that the deeper fiber of the personality is not changed when mental disease breaks into the personality. It is a new development in psychiatry that supports this point of view of the poets. It is not so long ago that Möbius asserted the psychological descriptions in Goethe's Tasso are without validity since Tasso was a paranoic.
The Scandinavian literature has always given great interest to psychopathological problems. Selma Lagerlöf gives a deep searching picture of the psychological development in paranoia in one of her novels. Strindberg's autobiographical novels are a brilliant exposition of his own schizophrenia. However, Oswald's disease in the Ghost's of Henrich Ibsen does not resemble any of the known psychiatric pictures. Magnhild Haalke's book has in so far a unique position as it describes a clinical psychiatric picture with great detail which is rare and not well known. Schizophrenia in Childhood is compara