[A Shakespeare's tragedy: the unclear border between affective and psychotic disorders]

The original radical separation between early dementia and manic-depressive illness, even considered incompatible, has its correlate in the present nosological systems that difficulty include clinical pictures in which the affective co-exists with the psychotic. The schizoaffective disorder is the only category that specifically includes this combination in the ICD-10 and DSM-IV international classifications. However, this is a very restrictive category. The concept of marginal psychosis, which has disappeared as a specific category, constituted an approach to those borderline cases, which in view of the diagnostic difficulties posed by pictures like the case presented, could be interesting to recover.