[Literature and psychiatry]

Psychiatry is a borderline science that has relations on one hand with the methods of knowledge of natural sciences, on the other with those of the humanities. To investigate the bases of its studies, the psychiatric science often refers to literary and philosophical masterpieces. Therefore, the author analyses some examples of the classic fiction which presents psychopathologic issues. Particularly, the author examines some principal topics: anxiety, psychosomatic illness, depression, schizophrenia and delirium.