Description:
Franco De Masi opens psychotherapeutic practice to include psychic suffering considered unreachable. 'Unanalysable' patients have an inactive dynamic unconscious, so clinicians must go beyond to engage with psychic processes outside conscious awareness. Packed with theory and clinical case studies, this book is a must-read for practitioners.
Review Quotes:
'Franco De Masi has devoted his career as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst to the study of the elusive condition of psychosis, and more broadly psychotic thinking, in the full knowledge that we as analysts do not yet have the tools and ideas we need to understand and treat individuals suffering from a psychotic illness. In this original book, De Masi conveys concisely the limitations of the concept of the dynamic unconscious when applied to minds in which the dynamic unconscious has ceased to operate, and guides us into new territory where psychosis has manufactured an alternative reality. The creation of a replacement reality and how to think and talk about it is of the greatest importance for anyone working with severe disturbance.'
--Paul Williams, Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California; former Joint Editor-in-Chief, International Journal of Psychoanalysis; author of Invasive Objects: Minds under Siege and The Fifth Principle Trilogy