Main description:

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.

Contents:

Rifts in the Ego; Part 1 The Time of Psychosis: From "Actual" to "Present"; Part 2 The Question of Origins; Part 3 When Going Back Is Impossible; Part 4 "Actual-Ness", Broken Time, Time in Confusion; Part 5 A Space for Psychosis: From Writing to Psychoanalytic Psychodrama; Part 6 Correspondence; Part 7 The Materiality of Writing; Part 8 Imprinting and the Effects of Reality; Part 9 The Vertigo of Creation; Part 10 Liminal Space, Manic Writing; Part 11 The Delusional Temptation and Imaging Thinking;