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Michael Robbins is the author of several important books including Experiences of Schizophrenia: An Integration of the Personal, Scientific, and Therapeutic (1993) and The Primordial Mind in Health and Illness. A Cross-Cultural Perspective (2011), which explore the world of schizophrenia, its implications in relation to the functioning of the primordial mind, and its connection to the sociocultural. Unfortunately, his works have never been reviewed for the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, making his most recent book Psychoanalysis meets Psychosis. Attachment, Separation, and the Undifferentiated Mind a timely opportunity for appreciating his work. The author commands a vast history of clinical experience, research and teaching regarding psychosis and primitive mental states. He writes:
Socio-cultural alienation is rooted in widespread unconscious acceptance of the biases of the dehumanizing organic medical model on the one hand, and those of a psychoanalysis that looks upon psychotic persons as constitutionally unable to become normal or neurotic on the other. As a result, psychoanalysis has rejected psychosis as beyond its scope and abandoned it to medical society, that conceives of it in a way that alienates the subject from his or her mind. This social alienation has been rationalized as scientific. … Schizophrenia, incidentally, is an unfortunate label because the social stigma attached promotes alienation. (174-176)
These affirmations neatly capture Robbins’ scientific excellence where he challenges the discriminating labels of pathology and health in promoting an integral vision of the human being. It is only the dominance of one aspect over the other that determines the external
phenomenology of the mind towards health or pathology. Robbins refers to Fairbairn’s theory of schizoid personality (1940), which holds that we are all psychotic, ranging from milder forms to more severe conditions like schizophrenia. Hence for Robbins psychosis becomes as