ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights some of the techniques and methods for using an intensive psychoanalytic psychotherapy in even the most disturbed and delusional patients. Even someone who was considered a hopelessly paranoid schizophrenic has responded to intensive psychotherapy focusing on interpretations about and exploration of transference, psychotic thinking, and regressions to younger self states, supplemented by reality testing and confrontation of paranoid delusions. Exploration and interpretation of intrapsychic conflict, resistance, transference and countertransference are some of the major tools that psychodynamic psychotherapists possess. Once understood through an exploratory psychotherapy of the whole person, delusions and schizophrenic thinking included, an attempt may be made to diminish antipsychotics. Using an intensive psychotherapy of schizophrenia and delusional states, some of these “untreatable” psychotic patients improved, some recovered, some healed and some were cured. To my mind, the choice of therapeutic method is clear.
