Sul mito della creatività schizofrenica On Myth of Schizoprenic Creativity

How can we imagine discussing the myth of “schizophrenic” creativity? At the end of the 19th century, Emil Kraepelin (1899) – still considered the founder of modern psychiatry – based his classification of mental disorders on the so-called psychological and linguistic turn of dementia praecox. Contemporary research in neurolinguistics and/or neuropragmatics focuses on attempts to standardize formal (linguistic) models to outline new diagnostic and therapeutic protocols to treat disorders on the schizophrenic spectrum. Thus, significant clues push in the direction of the so-called “linguistic nature” of psychoses. Beyond the actual capabilities in social cognition – for example, in linguistic usage of “metaphors” – the “psychotic” communicative-expressive need, that is, the need to “say”, to represent the delirious and hallucinatory reality, seems to be a characteristic trait of these mental disorders. After all, language is the main human device for constructing-translating thought and representing reality, and the expressive productions of patients – whether artistic, poetic, etc. – do not seem to characterize their creative abilities, but rather primarily manifest their expressive needs.