Language, Symbolization, and Psychosis

This book compares different psychoanalytic thinking and models-from a rigorously Freudian perspective-on three concepts of great theoretical and clinical importance: Language, Symbolization, and Psychoses. These concepts are significantly interwoven with each other both in personal development as well as in the atypical and individual forms of pathology. The authors have endeavored to reply to one of the foremost queries that has occupied Jacqueline Amati Mehler's thinking: whether and how the acquisitions of modern psychoanalysis have brought about changes in our criteria of analysability; whether our increased knowledge has lead to a greater therapeutic capacity, as she believes; and whether, as a consequence, we must endorse the so-called flexibility of the setting and the classical methods, as she does not believe.

In this book, the authors compare different psychoanalytic thinking and models – all of a rigorously Freudian stamp – on three concepts of great theoretical and clinical importance: language, symbolization, and psychosis.

Foreword -- Language, symbolization, and psychosis: an introduction -- A psychoanalytic enquiry into Pandora’s box: symbol and metaphor -- Deciphering the secrets of oblivion -- Self formation, symbolic capacity, and spontaneity -- A language for remembering the future -- Symbolization and psychosis: the mediating function of images in individual psychoanalytic psychodrama -- ‘White Psychoses’: silence and delusions -- When actions speak louder than words -- Reflections on listening to and speaking with the patient during analysis -- The past unconscious and the present unconscious -- The mystery of the unsaid name: commonalities between God and Rumpelstiltskin -- Texts and pre-texts in psychoanalytic clinical practice: languages and idioms -- Symbolism in love and sex -- Does the Pierce’s semiotic model based on index, icon, symbol have anything to do with psychoanalysis? -- The foreign language