Understanding Psychosis: A Psychoanalytic Approach

Do psychotic disorders make sense? Are psychotic symptoms amenable to interpretation? Psychoanalytic clinicians and scholars have outlined theoretical and therapeutic pathways to psychotic illnesses. In Understanding Psychosis: A Psychoanalytic Approach, these pathways are integrated into a genuine factor model that allows us to systematically assess the relevant psychodynamic dimensions in the diagnosis of psychotic disorders, and serves as a guide to psychotherapy with psychotically ill patients. For more than a century, psychoanalysis has contributed widely to an understanding of psychotic experience and dynamics. This book reviews and integrates the various concepts into a multi-dimensional psychodynamic model that allows us to assess and understand the patient's subjective experience, objective psychological capabilities, and interpersonal resources. It helps the therapist to find a basic attitude in working psychodynamically with psychotic patients and to understand the dynamics of the therapeutic relationship.

Specific issues addressed include: understanding imminent crises or precursor states, elucidating semiotic qualities in seemingly negative symptoms, differentiating the psychotic and a non-psychotic part of the personality, providing a dynamic approach to the psychopharmacological treatment. Understanding Psychosis will be of great use to psychiatrists, psychotherapists and psychoanalysts. It will also appeal to psychologists and postgraduate students and academics in the fields of psychotherapy, psychiatry and psychoanalysis for psychosis.