CONTRADICTION, CRITIQUE, AND DIALECTIC IN ADORNO A ...

delusional formations obtained through projection are incorporated into a well-ordered
system. The system offers the patient a new framework on the basis of which her libido
can be re-invested in the world, and relations to objects can be established anew. Some
of these relations incorporate remnants from the patient’s normal (healthy) stage, but
relations to key objects taken to represent or be implicated with what was abolished
internally are specifically hostile. This of course follows from the fact that the
framework is built in such a way that what was abolished internally returns as a hostile
presence from without. The system as a whole is fixed and all-encompassing, and its role
is both to enable the patient to recreate a world, and to fashion that world as a whole in
accordance with the patient’s delusions. Even where remnants of a normal state remain,
the libidinal investment of the patient in the world is as a whole driven by projection.
The system itself is symptomatic of the illness; through its framework, delusions
are rationalized through secondary revision and ordered in a fixed way along with the rest
of the patient’s “reality.” 207 In his analysis of Schreber, Freud quotes from a report
written by the patient’s last doctor, stating that the patient’s pathological ideas ultimately
“sich zu einem vollständigen System geschlossen haben, mehr oder weniger fixiert sind
und einer Korrektur durch objektive Auffassung und Beurteilung der tatsächlichen
Verhältnisse nicht zugänglich erscheinen” [these ideas formed themselves into a closed
system; they are more or less fixed, and seem to be inaccessible to correction by means of
“Psycho-analytic notes on an autobiographical account of a case of paranoia,” in ed. Strachey, James, The
standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 12 (London: Hogarth Press,
1974), 2437.
207 See Freud, Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse, in Sigmund Freud: Gesammelte
Werke, Vol. VIII (London: Imago Publishing Co., 1955), 396. English translation in ed. Strachey, James,
Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, in The standard edition of the complete psychological works of
Sigmund Freud, Vol. 16 (London: Hogarth Press, 1974), 3434.
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