ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author addresses precisely the difficulty of working through the psychotic crisis once and for all. He presents clinical material on two patients who relapsed into psychosis while in therapy. The analytic reflections in the author’s published paper had focused on the transformation that had taken place during the course of therapy in a particular psychopathological structure that trapped him in psychosis and seemed to be connected with the generation of hallucinations by a specific type of superego. It is very difficult to avoid psychotic episodes in the course of therapy where the analysand conceals the gestating delusional situation from the analyst. Post-critical understanding of the delusional episode can give rise to the creation of areas of self-awareness, thus avoiding the situation in which patients recover in the only way they know: that is, by blotting out the psychotic episode and carrying on as if it had never happened.
