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Professor Johan Cullberg, an author of several books of wide and divergent psychiatric topics, has now written a comprehensive text about psychosis and schizophrenia. Johan Cullberg is a distinguished academic researcher and teacher, also a psychoanalyst. He has 40 years' experience in public clinical practice. For years, his humane opinions have often remained a lonely expression and exception within the academic and other official Swedish psychiatric establishment. Therefore I especially find his new book important and daring: he still - with sincere patience - endures to defend the humane treatment of the psychotic person “in these decades of the brain”. To me, Johan Cullberg has always been somehow a fellow dissident, in a way an anti-psychiatrist staying within the official establishment.
The main thesis of Cullberg's book is to oppose all kind of reductionism when dealing with psychosis and its treatment. Primarily he intends to show that it is possible to integrate the humanistic and biological perspectives, both theoretically and in practice. In this endeavour, he has got remarkable company. Eric R. Kandel (1999), one of the three Nobel prize winners in medicine last year, has written: “We do not yet have an intellectually satisfactory biological understanding of any complex mental processes.… As biologists come to focus more of their efforts on the brain-mind, most of them have become convinced that the mind will be to the biology of the twentyfirst century what the gene has been to the biology of the twentieth century”.
I especially appreciate Cullberg's personal exposure to write about psychotic phenomena as a human existential situation, including his own mescaline experience as well as the fate of his artist brother.
The author discusses the subjective integration process of the outer and inner stimulus flow in the psychoanalytic and neurobiological frame of reference. He calls the experiencing part of the person, the self, which is interacting with others