Ordinary Psychosis And The Body

What is psychosis? How do we recognise it? Is it treatable? These deceptively simple questions point to complex problems that have occupied clinicians for centuries. In today's consulting rooms - perhaps more than ever before - clinicians are faced with a broad array of difficult to diagnose patients with demanding treatment challenges.

One response to the problem of diagnostic uncertainty is to revisit the rich psychiatric and psychoanalytic literature on milder psychosis, a category marginalised in today's psychiatry. This book draws on contemporary theories of psychosis developed by Lacanian theorists in the World Association of Psychoanalysis to examine body disturbances in milder forms of psychosis.

By focussing on body phenomena in conjunction with three practical elements of treatment - the onset of psychosis, psychotic states, and stabilisation - Jonathan D. Redmond shows that the problem of embodiment made evident by psychosis should be central to clinical assessment and treatment possibilities.