Delusion, narrative, and affects

Delusions and narrations have very different communicative characteristics. Delusion, when reported, places itself outside of a shared communication, of an interactive field; it is presented as an absolute, non-modifiable, saturated truth, that can only be believed or refuted. A clinical vignette is an example on the possibility that psychoanalytic treatments might be sometime able to at least partly transform a delusion into an account narrated in an interactive situation. The possibility of treatment of a delusion by means of psychotherapy, which deals both with the delusion as a symptom and with the structures underlying it, by creating a relationship whose development can leave the person free to shed his or her delusion, should caution us against too hastily declaring that symptom inaccessible and thus considering it-as not infrequently happens -a sort of "marker" denoting a pathology which, from a psychological perspective, cannot be treated.