ABSTRACT
At a meeting of the International Symposium for the Psychotherapy of Schizophrenia, subtitled “Building Bridges”, about 1,000 members gathered to hear a wide array of approaches to the treatment of psychosis. Some presentations seemed extraordinarily interesting and promising; some painstaking and confused; and yet disastrous to the sense of the patient as a person. In their book, History Beyond Trauma, F. Davoine and J. M. Gaudilliere note that the word, “therapist”, derives from the Greek for “the second in combat”. They are convinced that psychosis and trauma go hand-in-hand, that the psychotic patient is madly conducting a research into the rupture between his family and the social fabric, a rupture brought about through trauma and betrayal. The notion of a “speechless context” precisely describes the enveloping silence of this patient’s home life, a silence at the centre of her mother’s efficient but deadened care, through which nothing of herself was given or revealed.
