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Psychosis is an altered state of mind characterized by a predominance of primitive mental processes such as splitting, denial, and projection. More profoundly, it involves a retreat from frightening, hated, inner and outer realities into a dreamy, phantasmagoric often childlike state of being. This psychotic state is not necessarily a misfortune. Many observers have pointed out that it can be a creative experience, an attempt at emotional and social reconstitution after a period of great stress. Thus, Winnicott (1954) saw both psychosis and regression (they may occur separately or simultaneously) as the means by which some individuals seem to shed their false fronts in order to reach a new and vital relationship with themselves and the world. We can call this type of experience a “benign psychosis.”
However, more often than not, malicious intentions predominate. The affected person longs to annihilate hated feelings or relationships (and symbols) as well as anyone or anything associated with them. This more common event is best termed a “malignant psychosis,” for it is an invasive, life-destructive phenomenon.
Freud (1937) referred to the strength of such elements which attack ego growth and therapeutic change (traceable to “the original death instinct of living matter”) in his paper Analysis Terminable and Interminable. Similarly, Rosenfeld (, 1971, 1975) documented many of the psychotic processes that contributed to the “negative therapeutic reaction” in a variety of papers and books.
The aggressive forces that underlie the destructive, psychotic aspects of the self include envy, greed, and jealousy. They are attracted to and invariably attack the essential representatives of life — the breast (the vital source), the womb (female potency), and the penis (male potency) in all their real and symbolic forms. In this