By dealing with Conrad's research on incipient schizophrenia, this article demonstrates the actual relevance of the study: it highlights the structural approach of psychotic crisis inaugurated by him, even before Lacan expands the structuralist perspective to the clinic's phenomenology. The author emphasizes the strategy employed by Conrad, who proposes to discuss the origins of psychotic crisis in terms of the formal structure of the delirious perception. He shows therefore the way Conrad's perspective is able to recover the intelligibility of the psychotic phenomenon, in opposition to the strategy of comprehensive phenomenology founded by Jaspers, which relegates to the somatic plan of physical causality the mental occurrences deprived of comprehension.
Conrad; Incipient schizophrenia; Structure; Delirious meaning