The Person with Delusions

Abstract

“And the end of our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.” (Eliot, 1952, p. 145)In preparing this report I made the mistake of looking back in the literature, the literature not only of delusions, but also including some more general works of the earlier clinical writers, such as Birnbaum (1923), Conrad (1958), Jaspers (1963) and Kretschmer (1927). It was a humbling experience; these were obviously people who knew something about patients and about the realities of symptoms. For these writers, notions such as delusions were not just abstractions, not even just abstractions with operational definitions. These authors described real experiences of people, and their descriptions reflect the importance of studying patients from close clinical contact.