How can we understand the pull towards that which we fear: psychosis?

In this thought provoking book, Abensour proposes the idea of a temptation towards psychosis rather than a regression, as a response to the hatred or denial of the subject s origins. She shares her reflections on her psychoanalytic work with psychotic patients focusing on their struggle to achieve a coherent sense of a self that can inhabit a shared world. Abensour locates this struggle within the universal human struggle to achieve a balance between what we can and cannot allow ourselves to know about the reality of death and of our insignificance in the world.

How can we understand the pull towards that which we fear: psychosis?

In this thought provoking book, Abensour proposes the idea of a temptation towards psychosis rather than a regression, as a response to the hatred or denial of the subject s origins. She shares her reflections on her psychoanalytic work with psychotic patients focusing on their struggle to achieve a coherent sense of a self that can inhabit a shared world. Abensour locates this struggle within the universal human struggle to achieve a balance between what we can and cannot allow ourselves to know about the reality of death and of our insignificance in the world.

The International Journal of Psychoanalysis Key Papers Series brings together the most important psychoanalytic papers in the journal's eighty-year history in a series of accessible monographs. Approaching the IJP's intellectual rsources from a variety of perspectives, the monographs highlight important domains of psychoanalytic enquirry. 'The papers in this volume were commissioned with a view to describing the current views of countertransference, and thier historical evolution, in four intellectual communities of psychoanalysis: North America, Britain, France and Latin America. 'Psychoanalysis is still sometimes described as a monolithic and unchanging theory and practice. These papers vividly contradict such a view through their close study of the evolution of the concept of countertransference from the periphery of psychoanalysis to its current position of central importance in most analytic communities. In doing so, they provide a window of the development of a living and evolving discipline during its first one hundred years.'- From the Introduction by Richard Rusbridger