Introduction

This chapter discusses the implications of the anti-psychiatry movement that happened in the 1960s. One of the implications is the generalized and rising criticism of the too comprehensive category of schizophrenia. The concern to recognize schizophrenia at an early stage continues and results in the proliferation of a group of border states, i.e., the borderline pathology and more recently also the schizo-affective disorders. From the 1960s onward articles here and there are published on hysterical psychosis, a specific psychosis which supposedly distinguishes itself from schizophrenia by its transience and its curability. Within Anglo-American analytic circles, beside established schizophrenia, borderline pathology or the borderline personality makes itself known; its actual, marginal but benign counterpart is the multiple personality disorder (MPD), which emerges particularly in hypnotherapeutical circles. This development is grounded on the experience of exhaustive marathon sessions with apparently neurotic, but unanalyzable patients, i.e., a completely different impetus than that of the psychiatric borderline emancipation.