ABSTRACT
In psychiatric practice, phobias present as a group of disorders of varying degrees of severity. In psychoanalytic theory, the dynamic relationship between hysteria, obsessions, and phobias has long been debated, and the variety of clinical courses that a phobia may take is well known to sometimes include schizophrenia. With the supervisory help of the psychosis team, themselves helped by the seminar discussions, the therapist began to acquire an increasing understanding of the meaning and nature of the psychotic disturbance. The nurse/therapist found Grace to be acutely agitated and severely confused. She believed that she was being attacked by rats, of which she had had a severe phobia since childhood. In Grace’s psychotic states of mind, the content is experienced in a typically concrete, non-symbolic way. The psychotic eruption is the expression of the reactivation of the unresolved emotional conflicts belonging to early developmental phases that have undergone distortion and subsequently have never been negotiated in later life.
