The Beauty of Delusions

Abstract

As cosmopoets we create our world - but we do not create our world independently from our surroundings. What we are doing is not a poetry work in the sense of arbitrary inventions, but an attempt to transfer extensively and intensively psychical processes into communicable events. Patients suffering from delusions are also cosmopoets, they also create their world. It is a more or less understandable world, it is a world which is more or less similar to the world of the non-deluded, and it is a world which on the one hand terrorizes the patient but on the other hand attracts the patient by its sublime beauty. In this context W.Janzarik spoke from an ‘enemy/partnership’ of patients with delusions of persecution. The deluded world is a non-contingent terrifying but also in any case at least to some extent a beautiful and attractive world. Thrown in the risky and ugly world of mental disorders characterized by ambiguity and precariousness, patients are looking for islands of safety and sublime beauty; such islands may represent delusional convictions. As meanings of the disorder and the resulting ambivalence between attractiveness and suffering represent important disorder maintaining factors, knowledge about them provide the indispensable basis for effective treatment strategies (in particular psychotherapy) of delusional syndromes.