ABSTRACT
A psychotic breakdown means that the individual decides to cut off any link with the living world—both inner and outer existence. The whole art of psychoanalysis is to find a way of awakening the child paralysed, asleep, or excluded from the self in its daily task of playing a role. They suffer from transitivismus—the phenomenon in classical psychiatry characterized by the fact that the patient gets entangled with the identity of someone else, thereby losing clear-cut boundaries. The psychotherapist/analyst has to help the patient to find the correct distance for communication, and to find the proper boundaries for relating—those that are tolerable for the patient and for the analyst at that time. For instance, in one session, a patient speaks about the moon or about a lighted lamp in the consulting-room. This may be a way of expressing something about "enlightening" intermediaries—espe-cially if the patient has the feeling that he or she has just turned into a devitalized shadow.
