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Since the dawn of psychoanalytic scholarship, observations from the author's own treatment have often been misportrayed as data from clinical practice with patients (Bromberg & Aron, 2019). With albeit notable exceptions like Kay Redfield Jamison, psychologists for the most part do not publicly divulge their personal struggles with mental illness. Yet in his memoir Anatomy of a Psychotic Experience, psychoanalyst Richard Reichbart promises to break precedent with an autobiographical account of psychosis. The slim volume is divided into two parts: a description and analysis of the experience, written about a decade after the fact for his master's thesis, followed by reflections a half-century later. This structure is rare, allowing Reichbart to uniquely evoke the intensity of his experiences while also dissecting them sophisticatedly.
In the first section, Reichbart attributes his psychotic break to an inability to process the death of his grandfather, with whom he was very close. He became disenchanted with his choice to pursue a law degree instead of becoming a doctor like his grandfather, and disenchanted with city life—so dismal compared to the country life he associated with his grandfather. “I realized,” Reichbart writes, “how hard I had strayed from my inner beliefs which I associated to him.” Psychoanalytically, the loss of his grandfather, Reichbart explains, awakened repressed feelings regarding a different time the man “departed”
him: when Reichbart was two and had to leave his grandfather and the countryside to live with his parents in the city. And so, when his grandfather died, he was partially glad; finally, his grandfather was being punished for abandoning him. But he did not wish to recognize or deal with these feelings, and so, to avoid the difficulty of accepting his grandfather's death, he constructed “a new reality, one in which I lived out a drama of being like my grandfather in a setting reminiscent of the country that I associated to him.” N