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††Psicoanalisi delle psicosi is divided into Introduction: by the three editors, and four parts: (1) General Perspectives on the Psychoanalytic Experience with Psychosis: Didier Houzel (France), John Kafka (USA), Franco De Masi (Italy), Riccardo Lombardi (Italy); (2) Communication and Empathy with the Psychotic Analysand: Mark J. Blechner (USA), Michael Robbins (USA), Stefano Calamandrei (Italy), Sarantis Thanopulos (Greece); (3) Particularities of Thought: Giuseppe Civitarese (Italy), Luigi Rinaldi (Italy), Paul Williams (Great Britain); (4) Flexible Integration between Psychoanalysis and Pharmacology: Ira Steinman (USA), Giuseppe Martini (Italy).
From the first lines of text, the editors—Lombardi, Rinaldi, and Thanopulos—are specific about their basic assumptions:
The realm of psychotic experience contains potential knowledge that is still largely unexplored: a potential whose exploration can enrich all persons interested in the human condition, but especially professionals and workers in mental health. We are convinced, in fact, that psychoanalysis can be enormously enriched by the exploration of the psychoses as a basis of renewal. (2)†
The principal road towards this enrichment, in their opinion, lies in “relocating our science in its clinical origin, reactivating the exploration of the more extreme forms in which mental discomfort is presented” (2).
These are statements that, in my opinion, join the scientific undertaking to the ethical one, and that sweep the field clear of the risk of slipping into intellectual and pretentious perspectives. These are the same perspectives held by certain sectors of the anti-psychiatric feeling of
the 1960s and ’70s, and that could be traced as well in When the Sun Bursts: The Enigma of Schizophrenia (2015), by Christopher Bollas, where one can read that schizophrenia
can be, in its own way, a kind of art form; a vast, complex performance art in which the person moves about in the world … . The schizophrenic, however, will a