ABSTRACT

How can we understand the pull towards that which we fear: psychosis?

In this thought provoking book, Abensour proposes the idea of a temptation towards psychosis rather than a regression, as a response to the hatred or denial of the subject’s origins. She shares her reflections on her psychoanalytic work with psychotic patients focusing on their struggle to achieve a coherent sense of a self that can inhabit a shared world. Abensour locates this struggle within the universal human struggle to achieve a balance between what we can and cannot allow ourselves to know about the reality of death and of our insignificance in the world.

chapter |10 pages

Rifts in the Ego

part |49 pages

The Time of Psychosis: From “Actual” to “Present”

part |49 pages

A Space for Psychosis: From Writing to Psychoanalytic Psychodrama

chapter |14 pages

Correspondence

chapter |16 pages

The Materiality of Writing

part |35 pages

The Vertigo of Creation