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The subject of the psychoanalytic understanding of psychosis is one that has a long, distinguished and fruitful history. Freud himself grappled with the problem in his attempts to analyse Schreber's Memoirs, and however derivative the case material, it proved to be a rich and fertile testing ground for some of Freud's early ideas about narcissism, object relations and primitive ego functioning, particularly psychotic defence mechanisms and what we would refer to in our day as ego deficits.
In his attempts to understand Schreber's delusional system, Freud inaugurated a tradition that has borne considerable fruit over the years, and counts among its distinguished contributors a veritable 'who's who' of eminent psychoanalysts. The names are all too familiar—Abraham, Arlow, Bak, Bion, Brenner, Eissler, Fairbairn, Federn, Ferenczi, Freedman, Fromm-Reichmann, Glover, Hartmann, Jacobson, Jung, Katan, Klein, Knight, Levine, Mahler, Niederland, Nunberg, Rosenfeld, Schilder, Searles, Sullivan, Tausk, Waelder, Will, Winnicott, and last but not least John Frosch himself. In this work, John Frosch presents us with a summary and a compendium of this rich analytic tradition and a complex understanding it has generated of the psychotic process. Frosch brings to his task not only a rich and informed theoretical background, but the fruit of more than forty years of clinical experience gained on a variety of fronts in which he has met and struggled with the difficulties of dealing with and understanding psychotic patients. Throughout the exposition, his deep grasp of theoretical approaches and the depth of his clinical acumen and the richness of his experience are evident. The theory is in no sense a colourless statement of abstract principles, but becomes a living vehicle by which the clinician comes to meet and grapple with the complexities of clinical experience. Throughout his effort, Frosch remains close to the clinical data, never straying very far from its enmeshment, and