ABSTRACT
From the mid-1930s through the 1970s, psychoanalytic perspectives dominated the theoretical literature on the treatment approaches for psychotic disorders, even though the majority of psychoanalysts agreed with Freud that psychoses were beyond the disorders reachable through psychoanalytic techniques. They believed the problem lies with the patient's disorder, which involves `withdrawal of cathexis from the outside world'. Sadly and regrettably, the patient was beyond our reach. C.G. Jung and Karl Abraham, however, wrote more optimistically on psychoanalytic treatment of psychosis, Abraham focusing on manic-depressive psychosis. Arlow and Brenner, in their widely studied classic Psychoanalytic Concepts and the Structural Theory (1964), explicitly disagreed with Freud regarding the schizophrenic's withdrawal of cathexis.
