On Freud's “Neurosis and Psychosis” and “The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis”: 100 Years Later. Edited by Gabriela Legorreta and Catalina Bronstein. New York:  Routledge, 2024,  178 pp., $42.99 paperback.

This book summoned me with its invitation to explore the cleavage between “neurosis” and “psychosis.” These terms are a part of our everyday parlance. But how do we use them? We certainly do not use them in stable ways. How can we define the relationship between these two terms? After his voluminous writings on neuroses, Freud (1924/1961a, 1924/1961b) investigated this terrain. Should we think of this as a binary that needs to be deconstructed? Binaries imply that one term derives from the other, and that one is therefore more powerful than the other. Does psychosis derive from neurosis? Or should we think of it as an impressive caesural space between these terms? Gabriela Legoretta and Catalina Bronstein remind us of Freud's attempt to distinguish these two fraught terms. The editors outline the landscape of psychosis, the differing relations with reality, and its implications for technique across the four regions of the International Psychoanalytical Association. In this slim and thoughtfully curated set of essays, we move between vertices to see the relationship between neurosis and psychosis.

Freud uses these two terms both as oppositional and as part of a continuum. Both attempt to turn away from reality. Both arise from an intolerance for frustration. Yet they have differing relationships with reality. In neurosis, the ego is in battle against the id; while in psychosis, the ego is overcome by its id and tears away from reality. In psychosis, the rejected part of reality is constantly forcing itself on the mind, and the transforming of reality is carried out upon all the precipitates of psychic history. All memory-traces, ideas, and judgements derived from previous experiences

must be altered in the psychotic machinery (Freud, 1924/1961a, p. 185). So we see these are both similar (etiologically) and different (in manife