Psychoanalysis Meets Psychosis

Michael Robbins is former Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, USA. He is a member of the American and International Psychoanalytic Associations. His previous books include Experiences of Schizophrenia (1993), Conceiving of Personality (1996), The Primordial Mind in Health and Illness: A Cross-Cultural Perspective (2011), and Consciousness, Language and Self: A Psychoanalytic, Linguistic and Anthropological Exploration of the Dual Nature of Mind (2018).

Theorists of psychosis whose contributions are discussed in chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7

Introduction

PART I: NOT FULLY HUMAN: THE UNWITTING COLLUSION BETWEEN MEDICINE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

1: Not fully human: Psychiatric and psychoanalytic understandings of psychosis

2: The medicalization of madness: Evolution of the equation of psychosis with degeneracy

PART II: PSYCHOANALYTIC MODELS OF PSYCHOSIS

3: Freud’s attempt to treat psychosis as though it were neurosis
Obsessive-compulsive thoughts or delusional/hallucinatory enactments?
Freud’s interpretive enactment of his theory of repressed unconscious and its results

4: Freud’s three models and their offspring i: The inability to relate

5: Freud’s three models and their offspring iia: The inability to integrate mind and become neurotic: The European Kleinian iteration

6: Freud’s three models and their offspring iib: The inability to be neurotic: the American ego psychology iteration of the integration model and Kernberg’s transatlantic rapprochement

7: Freud’s three models and their offspring iii: Thought disorder: the primary process

PART III: A NEW BEGINNING: DISTINGUISHING PSYCHOSIS FROM NEUROSISClinical preface to chapters 8, 10, & 13
Jane
Jacob
Lisabeth
Charles

8: Two conscious mental processes: The role of primordial consciousness in psychosis and other human phenomena
Misconceptions of psychosis as an adult onset disorder of genetic origin
Characteristics of reflective representational thought
Characteristics of primordial consciousness or first mind
Clinical illustrations of primordial consciousness
Dreaming and primordial consciousness
Attachment and the commencement of psychic life

9: Return to the Rat Man: Psychosis as a manifestation of primordial consciousness

10: Psychosis as a disorder of attachment and separation-individuation
Psychosis and pathology of separation: The stages of separation
Relationship between schizophrenia and psychotic personality disorder: The false self
Clinical illustrations of false self
Good enough attachment and development of the two mental processes: Rank and Bowlby
Pathology of attachment, maladaptive persistence of primordial consciousness, failure to separate, and development of psychosis Clinical illustrations of pathological attachment and failure to separate

PART IV: TREATMENT OF PSYCHOSIS

11: The medical treatment of psychosis: Transforming psychosis from a socially disruptive to a socially adaptive disease

12: Studies of the efficacy of psychological and psychoanalytic therapies of psychosis

13: Psychoanalytic therapy of psychosis: Transforming primordial conscious mentation to reflective representational thought
The therapeutic process
The remembered and reconstructed past
The process of therapy
Stages of therapy with schizophrenic persons and psychotic personalities
Criteria of successful treatment and outcome

14: Qualities of a psychoanalytic therapist of psychosis

15: Patients write about their therapy

16: The 11 year therapy of a chronic paranoid schizophrenic woman
Background
Year one
Year two
Year three
Year four
Year five
Year six
Year seven
Year eight
Year nine
Epilogue
Discussion

17: Conclusion

References

Index