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:

Chervet, Foreword. Rifts in the ego. Part I: The Time of Psychosis: from "Actual" to "Present". The Question of Origins. When going back is impossible. "Actual-ness", Broken Time, Time in Confusion. Part II: A Space for Psychosis: From Writing to Psychoanalytic Psychodrama. Correspondence. The Materiality of Writing. Imprinting and the Effects of Reality. Part III: The Vertigo of Creation. Liminal Space, Manic Writing. The Delusional Temptation and Imaging Thinking.