A video recording of the 2nd Lambeth and Southwark Mind Annual Lecture held in conjunction with BLOCK336 is now available. In this lecture, Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz, founder of the Psychosis Therapy Project, reflects on the last four years of establishing this project and providing long-term talk therapy to people experiencing psychosis.
I think the question to ask is, can psychoanalysis treat psychiatry? It has an extremely big shadow
Can psychosis treat psychoanalysis? Freud kept clear of people labeled “psychotic”, whom he considered beyond the pale of analysis, preferring instead to work with people labeled “neurotic” or “hysterical”. Szasz differentiated between people whose behavior others complained about (“psychotics”) and people who complained about their own behavior (“neurotics”). The moral is…lay off trying to change the behavior of, however “sick”, well enough. Psychiatry upset the psychoanalytic applecart with the DSM III. Still, it’s a rocky terrain, and psychiatry’s solution has meant a return to, what do you call them, “incurables”, chronicity, a massive amount of long-term treatment failures. Of course, psychiatry’s success is in manufacturing so many failures that going out of business must be seen as unthinkable. Faux cynicism, in this case (the artificial invalid business), proving very lucrative.
