Abstract: In the following essay I deal with some details concerning the psychotic literary system. I start with Humpty Dumpty, nursery rhyme, probably from 16th/17th Century. Nursery rhyme is recovered by Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) in Through the Looking Glass and continued by James Joyce (1882-1941) in Finnegans Wake. A translation of Humpty Dumpty poem was lately – in 1943 – proposed, by the psychiatrist Gaston Fedrière, to Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), at the asylum of Rodez, where Artaud was secluded and electroshocked from 1943 to 1946. The Fall of the mason Finnegans from the wall, and his resurrection as the word whiskey is proffered – in an Irish folktale – is linked with Humpty Dumpy’s nursery rhyme, in an assemblage of delusional associations, so as in Ulysses the “plump Buck Mulligan”, who shaves on the top of the Martello Tower1. The reader will finally see, in Artaud’s Work a still more radical way of treating the language, using extra-semantic expressions and glossolalia. Within these procedures of writing there is a poetic, which approaches more and more psychosis and, in part, overlaps it: partially a literary experience to live and conceive psychosis, partially a real psychotic expression.

Direttore del Centro Milanese di Terapia della Famiglia, insegna Teorie psicodinamiche all’Università di Bergamo, membro di World Association for Cultural Psychiatry (WACP) e di International Society for Psychological and Social Approach to Psychosis (ISPS). Ha curato Le radici culturali della diagnosi (Meltemi, Roma) e, con Enrico Valtellina, Louis Wolfson Cronache da un pianeta infernale (manifestolibri, Roma). Ha scritto Anoressia e isteria (Cortina, Milano), Figure della relazione (ETS, Pisa), Lo schizofrenico della famiglia (Meltemi, Roma), I linguaggi dell’isteria (Mondadori Università, Milano), Follia e creazione (Mimesis, Milano), La follia rivisitata (Mimesis, Milano).