ABSTRACT
Psychotherapy is a world within the world, one in which patient and therapist gaze into each other's eyes and see themselves reflected in ways that may clash profoundly with what they feel is true or most deeply need. A great task facing us in the years ahead will be the thorough phenomenological re-description and reconceptualization of severe psychological disorders, and then a corresponding development of psychotherapeutic approaches embodying the new understandings that are attained. The intensive psychotherapy of severe mental illness, so-called, offers two intertwining opportunities. On the one hand, one has a chance to give help to a fellow human being who is in trouble, perhaps the deepest psychological trouble that there is. On the other hand, one encounters phenomena that are at the far extreme of human experience, showing fundamental issues of all our lives with extravagant clarity and drama. The great psychoanalyst, Frieda Fromm-Reichman, in 1954 published a classic clinical study.
