ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to share insights and understandings that have developed during the author's work as an art therapist in a psychiatric setting that can be considered typical of those available to people experiencing psychosis in the USA. It explores that Lacanian psychoanalysis has much to contribute to understanding the value of art therapy as an approach to psychosis. The chapter explains the general considerations concerning psychosis, including differences between the psychiatric and the psychoanalytic perspective, symbolic functioning in psychosis in general, and the relation to language in particular. There is an area of consensus in understanding, regardless of theoretical perspective, which is that one significant feature of psychosis is a certain impairment in symbolic functioning. The very wide variety of mental health disciplines are all in some form or another descendants of the discourse of science, but some are closer to this lineage than others.
