ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the various ways psychoanalysis approaches the treatment of psychosis and how the subject, the psychotic patient, is conceived, and offers a theoretical foundation for understanding the work of psychoanalysis in institutional psychiatric treatment. Lacanian psychoanalysis regards psychosis as a structure that is formed around the time when a child is negotiating the Oedipus complex and as a consequence of the child's triangular relation with his or her parents. A question prior to any possible treatment of psychosis was identified by Lacan as the handling of the transference. Stabilisation is a place of symptomatic construction where the psychotic subject seems, for a while, to be in a state of remission. Object relations theory is an organised explanation of personality development and the evolution of psychopathology based on the creation of internalised mental representations of interpersonal relationships. The members of the White Institute came together to deliberate on ideas concerning the interpersonal and psychosocial aspects of communication.
