Psychosis: Phenomenological and Psychoanalytical Approaches edited by Jozef Corveleyn and Paul Moyaert Leuven:  Leuven University Press, 2003,  165 pp.

The neuroscientists tell us that a human brain contains about one hundred billion neurons and that nothing they know will predict a sudden heroic act, or, for that matter, the person with whom we will fall in love. When there is a question of love, or heroism, we introspect, turning to the kind of thinking formalized in phenomenology or psychoanalysis, rather than thinking about the molecular biology of the neuron. There is also a place for phenomenological or psychoanalytic thinking, as well as the thinking formalized in science, when it is craziness that is at stake.

Psychosis: Phenomenological and Psychoanalytical Approaches is a collection of scholarly papers about psychosis from perspectives within phenomenology, and Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Most are written in English. One paper was translated from Flemish and another from French. For the North American reader, this European perspective, embedded in philosophical scholarship, presents ideas that maybe new as well as ideas that may be familiar, but are presented in a fresh light.

The book is the third in a series called “Figures of the Unconscious,” published by Leuven University Press. The series is the project of a Belgian group who collaborate closely with and extend the work of Alphonse De Waelhens (1911-1981), the Belgian philosopher of phenomenology who summarized, elucidated, and expanded upon Lacan's post-structuralist