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We are probably more aware now than in the past that organizations are often places that effortlessly manage to bring out the worst in people. The sadistic impulses that previously we thought only existed elsewhere have now been shown to be entwined in the heart of those institutions that purport to protect and care for our psychic as well as our bodily distress. Indeed, it could be argued that in mental health services, violence has often been systematized.
In the interwoven ‘places’ of psychosis and psychoanalysis we inevitably find the institution saturated in mythologies that have been fabricated to produce severely distorted histories. This, if we are to believe Roland Barthes, is in part because all texts are woven (texere). What Freudian discourse adds to this insight, reversing the Homeric principle, is that weaving always belongs to the night. The dream, that is to say, is an analogue of writing. Conflicts and deception are spun into literature and this includes the literature that institutions manufacture indirectly as well as directly. Psychoanalysis itself has produced diverse institutions of its own - schools, theoretical allegiances, authorizing bodies, and local and national organizations. Thus a psychoanalytic perspective on institutions is in itself a complex notion. But the title of this study is deceptive. The book does more than look psychoanalytically at institutions that treat those with a psychosis, although it does this in Chapter 4. It also reviews, in Chapters 6-9, some of the institutions which follow or followed a psychoanalytic methodology, however elastically that is understood. The institutions that the author has selected for consideration are listed at the back of the book (pp. 229-30). This makes it immediately clear where the author's sympathies lie.
After an introduction that outlines the conceptual framework of the book, the tale that Belinda Mackie tells in the preliminary chapter on psychiatry and psychoanalysis is one in which s