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From among the many authors whom Willem H. J. Martens mentions in the first paper of this issue, “Healing dynamics of psychosis,” let me start with H. S. Sullivan (1892–1949), who concluded his very first scientific article, “Schizophrenia: Its conservative and malignant features” (1924; also included in the 1962 anthology Schizophrenia as a human process) with the following words: “The important conclusion reached in the investigations from which this paper proceeds designates schizophrenia as a series of major mental events always attended by material changes in personality, but in itself implying nothing of deterioration or dementia” (1962, pp. 12–13). If Sullivan's constructive attitude to and successful work with schizophrenic patients represented one of the basic reasons for his critique of Freud (who considered these patients “incapable of transference”), and for founding interpersonal psychiatry and psychoanalysis, his pioneering work into the psychological dynamics of schizophrenia must be – similarly to Freud's own work – rediscovered by every generation. It is no wonder – as I reported in my own book on Sullivan (Conci, 2010) – that Ronald D. Laing, reviewing Schizophrenia as a human process in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, had written that “most of the work that Sullivan's vision demanded is still not done” (1963, p. 378). I therefore thank our Dutch colleague for his very articulate review of the psychoanalytic literature on psychoses, and for the help he gives to each one of us in trying to meet the clinical and therapeutic challenge arising from our psychotic patients.
One specific concept of the psychodynamics of schizophrenia which I was particularly happy to find in Professor Martens' very useful review is Gaetano Benedetti's and Maurizio Peciccia's concept of “the splitting between separate and symbiotic states of the self,” which they originally published in this journal (1996) and whose further validation has enabled Dr. Peciccia t