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Writing about psychoanalytically grounded treatment of patients suffering with psychotic conditions is a difficult thing to do, perhaps in some ways almost as difficult as actual treatment. No professional “genre” or set of conventions lends itself naturally to the task. There is a sense in which every clinician who undertakes the challenge becomes a sort of lone pioneer—yet even Bion needed a supportive community to enable his work, and Searles had the backing of a well-established institutional setting.
Liliane Abensour belongs in this line of distinguished yet necessarily idiosyncratic clinicians who have taken advantage of favourable social and political circumstances to create a voice for the psychoanalytic treatment of psychosis. Unfortunately, Psychotic Temptation, originally published in 2008, may turn out to be Abensour's last word on the subject: she died in the summer of 2011 at the age of 79, in full creative swing, with many projects on the go, some of which have been edited for posthumous publication by devoted colleagues and friends. Her passing was widely noted