Differential phenomenology of the paranoid psychoses in epilepsy

Abstract

First, the author makes reference to the psycho pathological and nosological questions associated with paranoid and schizophrenia-like psychoses in epilepsy and in particular to the non resolved problem of a distinction between these epileptic syndromes and the ones of schizophrenia. Starting from a phenomenological analysis of basic existential structures such as encounter or interpersonality, temporality and spatiality in a typical case of paranoid psychosis in epilepsy, the author tries to establish formal criteria which allow to distinguish these psychoses from schizophrenia. Thus it could be demonstrated that the structure of the encounter in the psychotic epileptic is quite conserved, both in what refers to the real and the delusional partner. His spatiality is characterized by the phenomenon of narrowness and his temporality by harassment, being necessary to underline the fact that, unlike what happens in schizophrenia, in the paranoid psychoses of epilepsy the space maintains its unity and the time its continuity. We could summarize the substantive difference between both types of paranoid psychoses with the following words: in paranoid syndromes in epilepsy what occurs is a change of state "within the world", while in schizophrenia it is a rather a modification of the "being-in-the world" itself or, with other words, it deals with a going out from the world constituted as community.