"Teaches us how the therapists can combine his theoretical knowledge, interpersonal skills, and creative inspiration to engage the patient and eventually help him emerge into a psychic world more like our own. This book is a compelling challenge to the conventional wisdom that schizophrenia is nothing more than an organically determined, incomprehensible madness."--Back cover.

With the integration of a modern object relations theory, a comprehensive psychodynamic developmental theory, and a clinically based psychology of the self into the mainstream of classical psychoanalytic theory, new models of personality development and psychopathology are emerging. These newer models, in turn, by broadening the conceptual basis for studying people by means of the Rorschach, have sparked a significant resurgence of interest in the test. This book examines the clinical and research uses of the Rorschach to the entire spectrum of primitive or developmentally earlier mental states, including narcissistic disturbances, eating disorders, victims of incest, and disturbances in gender identity. -- Publisher description.

Schizophrenia has been one of psychiatry's most contested diagnostic categories. The Sublime object of Psychiatry studies representations of schizophrenia across a wide range of disciplines and discourses: biological and phenomenological psychiatry, psychoanalysis, critical psychology, antipsychiatry, and postmodern philosophy.

Treatment can be a liberating experience. This book aims to show that its ultimate purpose is to help the patient achieve maximum individuation, to free him from the shackles that he has acquired during painful and frustrating experiences in infancy.

Psychoanalysis Meets Psychosis proposes a major revision of the psychoanalytic theory of the most severe mental illnesses including schizophrenia. Freud believed that psychosis is the consequence of a biologically determined inability to attain and sustain a normal or neurotic mental organization. Michael Robbins proposes instead that psychosis is the outcome of a different developmental pathway. Conscious mind functions in two qualitatively different ways, primordial conscious mentation and reflective representational thought, and psychosis is the result of persistence of a primordial mental process, which is adaptive in infancy, in later situations in which it is neither appropriate nor adaptive. In Part I Robbins describes how the medical model of psychosis underlies the current approach of both psychiatry and psychoanalysis, despite the fact that neuroscience has failed to confirm the model’s basic organic assumption. In Part II Robbins examines two of Freud’s models of psychosis that are based on the assumption of a constitutional inability to develop a normal or neurotic mind. The theories of succeeding generations of analysts have for the most part reiterated the biases of Freud’s two models, so that psychoanalysis considers the psychoses beyond its scope. In Part III Robbins proposes that the psychoses are the result of disturbances in the attachment-separation phase of development, leading to maladaptive persistence of a primordial form of mental activity related to Freud’s primary process. Finally, in Part IV Robbins describes a psychoanalytic approach to treatment based on his model. The book is richly illustrated with material from Robbins’ clinical practice. Psychoanalysis Meets Psychosis has the potential to undo centuries of alienation between society and psychotic persons. The book offers an understanding of severe mental illness that will be novel and inspiring not only to psychoanalysts but to all mental health professionals.