In this book, Liliane Abensour shares with us the development of her thinking based on her long experience of the psychoanalytic treatment of psychotic patients. In a delicate and well-balanced manner, she brings together the respectful and subtle attention that she pays to the tragic inner experience of the psychotic, her detailed knowledge of psychoanalytic papers on mental functioning in psychotic patients, and clinical illustrations either directly through a discreetly confidential evocation of her own patients or through works of literature and art.

This approach is an offshoot of the two great traditions that are characteristic of French psychiatry: humanism, with its acknowledgement that there