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With “action for mental health,” support for and responsibility to the severely mentally disturbed has increased. Greater opportunities for prevention, early recognition and treatment have been created.
A psychoanalytic approach which is holistic and growth-oriented can contribute to these objectives. It widens the possibilities for maintaining in the community the psychotically disturbed while therapeutically resolving their problems according to the potentialities of their total situation.
Hospitalization is often forestalled and the rupture of daily patterns in familiar milieus, with the added burdens of resuming communal living, avoided.
Where hospitalization was the treatment of choice, the experience can be constructively integrated during the treatment program after discharge.
The fruitfulness of psychoanalysis as an investigative tool becomes evident in the therapeutic situation. It enhances our knowledge of the natural history of these disorders, of the organismal-environmental variables fostering illness and recovery, and behavioral processes in the psychoses. New theoretical formulations and innovations in technique can be tested and clarified in the process of the intensive explorations possible with the psychoanalytic approach.