When the Sun Bursts: The Enigma of Schizophrenia by Christopher Bollas,  Yale University Press, 2015

In most modern psychiatric thought and practice, schizophrenia is said to be a biological brain disease for which treatment must mainly involve pharmaceuticals and other organic treatments (Lieberman & Oga, 2015; Torrey, 1986). Due to this hyper-reliance on pharmacology, psychoanalysis is often loosely classed with mesmerism, phrenology, and other obsolete and fanciful ways of diagnosis and treatment. Even among many psychoanalysts, it was thought that schizophrenia and other psychoses were not amenable to treatment with psychoanalytic methods (Deutsch & Roazen, 1985; ). However, there has always been a substantial school of thought within psychoanalysis that has championed the use of psychoanalytic methods and has reported significant improvements in patients and even cures. I remember reading I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (Greenberg, 1964), which was a recounting of a successful psychoanalysis of a schizophrenic young woman by the psychoanalyst Frieda From-Reichmann. Christopher Bollas is important in the ranks of psychoanalysts who treat schizophrenia. This sensitive, personally revealing, and profoundly perceptive book documents his career in learning about the nature of schizophrenic minds and how to treat them.

Bollas's book is organised around his personal evolution as a psychoanalytic therapist for people who have schizophrenia. He begins his story in the 1960s when he was a young counsellor at the East Bay Activity Center in Oakland, California, a school for disturbed, usually psychotic and autistic, children. Through this experience, which preceded his formal training as a psychoanalyst, he evolved certain principles fundamental to treating