25

This article examines the paradoxical capacity of paranoia in the psychotic field to generate affective and social links. It will do so by returning to Kraepelin’s founding definition, centered on the production of a constructed and explanatory Discourse, of the order of the world and the place occupied by the subject. Beyond the Freudian reference to the narcissistic pole of the psychotic spectrum, the paranoiac therefore appears, in the transference situation in particular, to occupy with determination the position of the “subject supposed to know,” and thereby show him or herself capable of eliciting a transference link of the part of poorly structured subjects in search of a guide in existence, even of societies in crisis, prey to social and political disarray.