Il caso clinico di Martha N.: Sabine Spielrein e un primo esempio di analisi del linguaggio schizofrenico.

Abstract

The present work aims to provide an analysis of the method used by Sabina Spielrein as a pioneering attempt at research on pathological language, in a historical moment in which the treatment of the disease was faced in an experimental way both in the methods and in the results. The psychological content of a case of schizophrenia (dementia praecox) is the first psychoanalytic dissertation written by a woman, one of the first interpretative accounts of schizophrenia and one of the first works in which the term schizophrenia is used. The subject of the thesis is the clinical case of Martha N., a woman suffering from schizophrenia of which Spielrein took care of observing the underlying language and apparently senseless of schizophrenic pathology by applying the “phylogenetic observation method”, with which he grasped the present parallelism between the mental activity typical of schizophrenics, the psychological process of dreams and the mythological thought to which the “mythological language” is associated. Spielrein reports in her work excerpts from the speeches of the sessions held with her patient: this is a valuable document that testifies to one of the first attempts to investigate pathological language.