The Psychotic Wavelength provides a psychoanalytical framework for clinicians to use in everyday general psychiatric practice and discusses how psychoanalytic ideas can be of great value when used in the treatment of seriously disturbed and disturbing psychiatric patients with psychoses, including both schizophrenia and the affective disorders. In this book Richard Lucas suggests that when clinicians are faced with psychotic patients, the primary concern should be to make sense of what is happening during their breakdown. He refers to this as tuning into the psychotic wavelength, a process that allows clinicians to distinguish between, and appropriately address, the psychotic and non-psychotic parts of the personality. He argues that if clinicians can find and identify the psychotic wavelength, they can more effectively help the patient to come to terms with the realities of living with a psychotic disorder. Divided into five parts and illustrated throughout with illuminating clinical vignettes, case examples and theoretical and clinical discussions, this book covers: the case for a psychoanalytical perspective on psychosis a historical overview of psychoanalytical theories for psychosis clinical evidence supporting the concept of a psychotic wavelength the psychotic wavelength in affective disorders implications for management and education. The Psychotic Wavelength is an essential resource for anyone working with disturbed psychiatric patients. It will be of particular interest to junior psychiatrists and nursing staff and will be invaluable in helping to maintain treatment aims and staff morale. It will also be useful for more experienced psychiatrists and psychoanalysts.

In this book, Marcus Evans makes a strong case for the importance of psychoanalytic supervision in mental health practice and its role in helping frontline staff to "tune in" to their patients' unconscious communications or the "psychotic wavelength".

This book demonstrates the use of psychoanalytic thinking in front-line mental health settings and aims to make an approach to working with emotional and mental disturbance available to a wide range of clinicians within psychiatric and other mental health settings. Rooted in the author’s extensive clinical experiences, the approach explored in this book applies psychoanalytic thinking and discusses this in relation to the mental health conditions regularly encountered in psychiatric settings, such as Schizophrenia, Manic Depression, Psychotic Depression, Anorexia, Deliberate Self Harm, and Personality Disorder. The book therefore provides valuable and practical ways of working with these difficult, complex, and problematic conditions. It further makes sense of the relationships and emotions encountered when working in these settings and introduces possibilities for more effective and rewarding ways of working, including a model of support through supervision, reflective practice, and clinical discussion. Illustrated by clinical examples from more than four decades of experience in the field, this book is ideal for the interested mental health practitioner.

A contemporary overview of the major psychological therapies and psychological approaches to mental disorder for all mental health professionals.

Can we reach the psychotic subject in their delusion? Psychopathological theorists often try to find a way to characterise this subject's inner predicament so that their opaque utterances and actions will now rationally hang together. In this pathbreaking work, philosopher and clinical psychologist Richard G. T. Gipps demonstrates how such efforts at rational retrieval actually result in us setting our face against the psychotic subject in their distress. Bringing together patient memoir, psychopathological observation and philosophical thought, Gipps offers a profound alternative. On the one hand he shows how, by appreciating just why we can't locate rational order within psychotic thought, we can better understand what it is to suffer delusion and psychosis. On the other, he recovers for us the value of such expressive, motivational and symbolic forms of understanding as only become available once we've been turned away at reason's door. In such ways Gipps not only solves the psychopathological problem of delusion, but also shows us how to bear a truer witness to the psychotic subject in their brokenness, pain and despair.

Schizophrenia: A Contemporary Introduction provides a vital overview of psychoanalytic work with patients dealing with schizophrenia, highlighting the many benefits of this approach and introducing key methods for mental health practitioners. This concise introductory volume starts by offering a brief historical introduction to how psychoanalysts, from Freud onwards, have approached schizophrenia and the methods they have used to alleviate the distress it causes its sufferers. Gillian Steggles illustrates how the developing relationship between patient and analyst can positively impact the patient’s mental functioning, leading to an improvement in their overall health and the ability to regain independence and self-reliance. She introduces theoretical psychoanalytic approaches, such as the Psychodynamic Pentapointed Cognitive Construct (PPCC) model, as a means of offering guidance to analysts dealing with schizophrenic analysands. This book will be of interest to practicing and trainee analysts, as well as those interested in the history of schizophrenia and its continued impact.

In this volume a number of British psychoanalysts introduce us to psychoanlaytic definitions of intra-psychic and subjective meaning in patients suffering psychotic conditions. Irrespective of the particular type of psychotic illness under consideration of the context or treatment, each paper illustrates how the psychoanalytic clinician searches to establish meaning from events which are highly complex and often overwhelmingly confusing.Contributors: "Psychosis and violence" Leslie Sohn; "Sorrow, Vulnerability and Madness", Michael Conran; "How Can You Keep Your Hair On?", Michael Sinason; "The Delusions of the Non-Remitting Schizophrenias - Parallels with Childhood Phantasies", Thomas Freeman; "Managing Psychotic Patients in a Day Hospital Setting", Richard Lucas; "Desctructive Narcissism" and "The Singing Detective", David Bell.