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Psychoanalytic Ideas is a new series published by the Institute of Psychoanalysis in London. The series editor is Inge Wise, and these are the first two titles. Each is a slim, inexpensive paperback consisting of an editorial introduction followed by half a dozen short papers originally given as public lectures by members of the British Psychoanalytical Society.
Lectures given before a live audience, and later collected and published, have a distinguished history in psychoanalytic education. The lectures that Freud gave ‘before an audience of doctors and laymen of both sexes’ (1916-17, p. 9) in Vienna, are still widely read as an introductory text. Other notable examples include Rickman (1936), Klein and Riviere (1937), Sutherland (1968), Joffe (1968), Symington (1986) and Anderson (1992). Common to these, through successive generations of psychoanalytic writing, are a clarity and economy of style, and an alive-ness, which make them a pleasure to read. This new series is no exception, and the first two volumes provide well-written and accessible introductions to recent psychoanalytic thinking on specific topics.
Introducing the contributors to Psychosis (Madness), all of whom are psychiatrists as well as psychoanalysts, Paul Williams identifies their shared psychoanalytic approach to psychosis as one that treats psychotic communication as having a meaning. He also argues cogently for the value of a psychoanalytic approach to psychosis at a time when the role of the hospital as asylum has diminished. A theme in several of these papers is the necessity of developing ‘insight’, i.e. perception of internal reality, as a condition of perceiving external reality and thus of escaping or mitigating psychosis. The various case-histories reported in them certainly provide powerful support for the psychoanalytic view that, inside or outside hospital, with or without drugs, this can only come about by means of a relationship.
In his beautifully narrated paper, Leslie Sohn describe