Beyond Medication focuses on the creation and evolution of the therapeutic relationship as the agent of change in the recovery from psychosis.

Organized from the clinician 's point of view, this practical guidebook moves directly into the heart of the therapeutic process with a sequence of chapters that outline the progressive steps of engagement necessary to recovery. Both the editors and contributors challenge the established medical model by placing the therapeutic relationship at the centre of the treatment process, thus supplanting medication as the single most important element in recovery.

Divided into three parts, topics of focus include:

• Strengthening the patient
• The mechanism of therapeutic change
• Sustaining the therapeutic approach.

This book will be essential reading for all mental health professionals working with psychosis including psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers.

Beyond Medication focuses on the creation and evolution of the therapeutic relationship as the agent of change in the recovery from psychosis.

Organized from the clinician 's point of view, this practical guidebook moves directly into the heart of the therapeutic process with a sequence of chapters that outline the progressive steps of engagement necessary to recovery. Both the editors and contributors challenge the established medical model by placing the therapeutic relationship at the centre of the treatment process, thus supplanting medication as the single most important element in recovery.

Divided into three parts, topics of focus include:

• Strengthening the patient
• The mechanism of therapeutic change
• Sustaining the therapeutic approach.

This book will be essential reading for all mental health professionals working with psychosis including psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers.

In this cohesive, dramatic, and highly readable book, the author establishes a roadmap for the diagnosis and psychotherapeutic treatment of psychotic disorders based on finding, understanding and reordering of unbearable affect. He provides concrete clinical advice, vivid examples, and crisp jargon-free descriptions of theoretical concepts and clinical techniques. Most of all, he demonstrates that it is possible for psychotic patients to take control of their conditions, rebuild family relationships, and establish themselves in the viable productive lives that they have long despaired of achieving.

In this groundbreaking volume, the authors bring us into the immediacy of the analyst's consulting room in direct confrontation with the thought disorder, delusions and hallucinations of their patients grappling with psychosis. From the early days of psychoanalysis when Freud explicated the famous Schreber case, analysts of all persuasions have brought a variety of theories to bear on the problem of schizophrenia and the other psychoses. Here, as William Butler Yeats notes, "the centre cannot hold" and any sense of self-esteem - positive feelings about oneself, a continuous sense of self in time and a functional coherence and cohesion of self - is shattered or stands in imminent danger. What makes psychoanalytic self psychology so compelling as a framework for understanding psychosis is how it links together the early recognition of narcissistic impairment in these disorders to the "experience-near" focus which is the hallmark of self psychology.