Ars Psychotica

In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud (1930) enumerates a series of “technique[s] in the art of living” (p. 81) that individuals employ to mitigate the consequent suffering of the demands made of culture upon the drives. Among these techniques is madness itself, an attempt to delusionally re-construct the world as one wishes in a futile attempt to fend off reality's misery. Freud's madman, though, “finds no one to help him in carrying through his delusion” (Freud, 1930, p. 81). But while no one is willing to help the madman in his remolding of reality, Freud is quick to note that much of social life is organized around mass delusion to “procure a certainty of happiness.” Despite the phenomenology of psychosis, which often includes isolation through withdrawing from the world, Freud in the above passage points to the inseparability of madness and collectivity, a point he had already alluded to in his prior Group Psychology, where he refuted the simplistic opposition between individual and social, including for the most extreme of “narcissistic” illnesses (1921, p. 69).

Several disciplines in the 20th and 21st centuries have addressed the encounters and chiasms between psychosis and the collective, including psychiatry, social work, sociology, and critical theory (e.g., the work of the Frankfurt School). As is often noted, the history of psychoanalysis and its approach to the treatment of psychosis is a thorny one, despite the encouragement of traditions including Kleinian, Bionian, and Lacanian to listen to madness with analytic ears. At the same time, psychoanalysts were integral to the development of a rich history of institutional and community therapies, such as the Chestnut Lodge and Austen Riggs in the U.S., as well as the work of François Tosquelles and Jean Oury in France and Franz Fanon in Algeria (; Robcis, 2016, 2020). More recent analytically-informed undertakings, among several others, have included the Psychosis Therapy Project in London (Gherovici,