finding a space to think and a way to talk

11
This article was downloaded by: [University of Cambridge] On: 27 October 2014, At: 05:48 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpps20 Finding a space to think and a way to talk Antony Garelick a a Consultant Psychiatrist and Psychotherapist , Tavistock Clinic , London, UK Published online: 10 Mar 2011. To cite this article: Antony Garelick (2011) Finding a space to think and a way to talk, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, 25:01, 3-12, DOI: 10.1080/02668734.2011.542908 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02668734.2011.542908 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms- and-conditions

Upload: antony

Post on 01-Mar-2017

214 views

Category:

Documents


2 download

TRANSCRIPT

This article was downloaded by: [University of Cambridge]On: 27 October 2014, At: 05:48Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Psychoanalytic PsychotherapyPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpps20

Finding a space to think and a way totalkAntony Garelick aa Consultant Psychiatrist and Psychotherapist , Tavistock Clinic ,London, UKPublished online: 10 Mar 2011.

To cite this article: Antony Garelick (2011) Finding a space to think and a way to talk,Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, 25:01, 3-12, DOI: 10.1080/02668734.2011.542908

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02668734.2011.542908

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever orhowsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arisingout of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Finding a space to think and a way to talk

Antony Garelick*

Consultant Psychiatrist and Psychotherapist, Tavistock Clinic, London, UK

Mental mechanisms and issues of psychoanalytic technique in the treatmentof psychotic states are explored and illustrated with clinical vignettes.The value of establishing a psychosis workshop to facilitate understandingand an appropriate language to communicate with the patient drawing on thework of Dr Richard Lucas and the author is described.

Keywords: psychotic states; psychoanalytic technique; container; primitivedefences

My interest in psychotic states of mind was stimulated by my experience as a

trainee psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital. It was there that I met Richard

Lucas and we became close working colleagues for the next 30 years.

The crucible for our experience was Ward 1 at the Maudsley: a psychiatric

in-patient unit run on therapeutic lines. My boss at that time was Dr John Steiner,

and he was succeeded by Dr Murray Jackson.

Richard Lucas was slightly ahead ofme in the training and hewent off to take up

a consultant psychiatrist post at Claybury Hospital. At that time I think he was the

only psychoanalyst running an acute admissions unit for a catchment area, and that

area was a deprived part of East London. He encouraged me to follow him to

Claybury and I duly took up the post of consultant psychotherapist there; it was

subsequent to this that we set up a psychosis workshop to facilitate our attempts to

understand psychotic states in patientswho had a formal diagnosis of psychosis such

as schizophrenia.

Finding the right home for the workshop is of significance: we started

meeting on the ward, his ward, then in adjacent offices to the ward, then we

moved to the doctor’s residence – all of these being in the main hospital. None

of them felt right. Eventually we moved to my unit at Forest House, a villa in

the grounds of Claybury, approximately 200 yards from the main hospital. This

became the settled location and there we found a space where we could think.

One of our early observations was that thinking can best take place at

some distance from the patient. Dr Henry Rey – one of my other bosses at the

Maudsley – told me about a young schizophrenic man whom he had interviewed.

This man spent hours looking through a telescope. It emerged that he was keeping

ISSN 0266-8734 print/ISSN 1474-9734 online

q 2011 The Association for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in the NHS

DOI: 10.1080/02668734.2011.542908

http://www.informaworld.com

*Email: [email protected]

Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

Vol. 25, No. 1, March 2011, 3–12

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

ambr

idge

] at

05:

48 2

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

in contact with aspects of his mind that he had projected into space. Rey suggested

that there was a direct correlation between the degree of mental disturbance and the

distance the projected part of the mind had to be relocated to in order to be able to

survive (Dr H. Rey, personal communication, 1978).We in the workshop needed to

have an appropriate distance from the patient in order to facilitate thinking.

I will now draw on fragments of clinical material to illustrate some of the

clinical challenges that arise when working with these types of patients. Their

details have been changed to preserve anonymity.

Case 1

The first patient was a young woman presenting with obsessional problems

including cleaning rituals, fear of leaving parts of her body on things she touched,

fear of loss of control, problemswith her body, feeling detached and living in aworld

of her own. Her diagnosis was initially obsessional neurosis. She entered into

analysis using the couch and her latent disturbance rapidly emerged. This included

more overt signs of psychosis, the most prominent being thought disorder.

In this complex case I will focus on fragmentation of thinking and body

image and issues of separation. The predominant mode of communication for this

patient in the early phase of the work was action language. This fits in very well

with Piaget’s developmental schema, the sensory motor schema (Beard, 1969).

Her verbal communication was fragmented, very difficult to make sense of and

there was some suspicion that she was also experiencing auditory hallucinations.

In her case it was difficult to identify the location of the sane part of the mind.

It clearly existed: the patient arrived to the sessions on time, at the right place, and

she left and survived in between sessions. In the early phases of the work the

only evidence of its existence seemed to be the boundaries of the session where,

reluctantly, there was an acknowledgement of the external world and the need to

leave the consulting room. Any disturbance in the analytic setting had a profound

impact but was also an opportunity to engage with the sane part of the mind.

Holidays were a striking example. Attempts to engage the patient to think

about this seemed to be futile, words from the therapist just hit a brick wall.

However, work was possible after the break when the analysis resumed. The

patient had an uncanny capacity to choreograph the sessions after a break at both

the body and verbal level. She gave a running commentary about bodily aspects

of the therapist, for example when the therapist was going to breathe, whether it

was through the mouth or nose, comments about any type of movement, so it was

as though the therapist was a puppet, magically controlled by the patient.

Similarly the dialogue of the therapist was controlled by the patient, the

therapist finding that the things she said seemed to be scripted by the patient.

However, if the therapist deviated from this script the patient became disturbed

and would block out the therapist’s words by covering her ears or singing,

sometimes shouting. This could be understood as her defence against the rupture

in the setting: she transformed this painful reality by utilizing concrete

Antony Garelick4

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

ambr

idge

] at

05:

48 2

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

omnipotent control and fusion with the therapist, thus ablating an experience of

separateness. This was something that could be worked on with a focus on a break

and its meaning, and by developing the capacity to experience separation and

tolerate the recognition of patient and therapist as two separate people.

Further work in this area led to it becoming apparent that the breaks and

separations were filled-in by the patient creating a continuous dialogue with the

therapist, some of which was hallucinatory in character. The experience of

separateness, and the associated capacity to challenge the omnipotent creation of

her own world, centred around disruptions of this sort in the analytic set up, and it

was around these types of issues that more meaningful verbal interchange

became possible. It should be remembered that speech requires the transmission

of sound, which in turn requires that objects are separated by air, this being the

medium for sound transmission.

The issue of separateness and integrity of the body manifested itself in an

additional way: that of the patient merging into the couch. At the end of the session

the therapist witnessed what appeared to be the patient tearing herself away from

the couch. Witnessing this process was excruciatingly painful for the therapist,

there was no sense of her skin acting as a boundary to her body. The ripping apart

revealed the sense of exposed flesh, like a gaping wound, experienced by the

patient as a cruel action which had been perpetrated by the therapist.

It is important to state at this point an inherent difficulty in writing a paper on

psychotic states of mind: in writing one endeavours to be coherent, but this

minimizes the reality of the difficulty of the work when faced in the room with

fragmented thinking and the action language of the patient. This type of patient is

basically in some primitive form of confusional state and our familiar concepts

that we use in thinking about our work are difficult to apply, and are therefore for

a lot of the time of limited help. Mechanisms such as transference and projective

identification – even splitting – are not easy to utilize because they assume a

level of coherence in the mental organization. Even at the part object level there

is separation between two elements.

This was not very evident in the early phases of the work in this case.

Rey wrote:

The whole of the therapeutic exchange can be summarised by answering thequestion: what part of the subject, situated where in time, is doing what to theobject, where in time and space, with what consequences for the subject and object(Rey, 1994).

In the early phases of the work with this patient it was not possible to map out the

mind in this type of way, although clearly it was the guiding principle at one level

of the work.

The main area of the work was re-establishing a container with the capacity

initially for the psychoanalyst to learn the language and experience of the patient,

and then to allow the psychoanalyst to employ a form of language that the patient

could make use of. While one is trying to navigate in these uncharted territories,

Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy 5

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

ambr

idge

] at

05:

48 2

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

an organizing principle is Bion’s notion of the psychotic and non-psychotic part

of the mind (Bion, 1957). The therapist in this type of clinical situation acts as an

auxiliary ego, a container, endeavouring to contain the very powerful phenomena

of fragmentation, confusion and identity dissolution.

This is a formidably difficult task and it is quite understandable when it comes

to containment why patients with a psychotic breakdown need to have an

admission to a mental hospital. There is the need for a physical container to deal

with the power of the fragmentation and projective processes that take place,

as well as their expression in the behaviour of the patient. Rey used to call the

mental hospital ‘the brick mother’ (Rey, personal communication, 1978) and

I think this is a very apt description that captures the need to be robust enough to

cope with such a demanding clinical situation. Part of the work we are doing is to

maintain the human element and relationship with our patients in the face of

very powerful challenges. This is graphically described in Richard Lucas’s book,

The psychotic wavelength (Lucas, 2009) which emphasizes tuning in at the right

level to the patient’s communication.

Returning to the patient, and jumping ahead to a later stage in the analysis,

the patient felt more integrated and was able to describe the changes in her as

follows: she felt that she had been like a large suitcase where everything had been

screwed up and thrown in at random, then the suitcase was closed the wrong way

round so the two halves with the contents were pointing outwards, and the outside

part of the case was inside. Now she was feeling the right way around.

This was a very valuable description and highlights the importance of

learning the language and subjective experience of the patient. It made the

experience of the couch, and tearing herself off it, comprehensible, as it did her

symptoms of losing part of herself when she touched things. It also helped to

explain the thought disorder and the problems with her mental apparatus that

produced her difficulties in thinking. She had a confused fragmented body, or

more accurately body ego, where things were put together in a haphazard way;

where the inside had become the outside and the outside had become the inside.

If we think about normal body image we are in effect like a doughnut or bagel.On the outside we have our skin: the boundary which holds the body contents inside,houses the perceptual sensory system, and is also a stimulus barrier for regulatingour contact with the environment. The hole in the middle is our gastro-intestinalsystem, our bowel, which again communicates with the outside; it is after all simplya long tube from mouth to anus. Bion made reference to psychotic states of mindworking rather like the bowel, evacuating and expelling things (Bion, 1957, p. 274).

I think this metaphor and his theory of thinking – the transformation of these

elements, the ‘beta elements’ or precursors, through alpha function into thoughts –

is a very useful description (Bion, 1962).

I found this helpful in thinking about this case: when in her psychotic state,

her bowel was in effect the external skin in a tube-like form, and there was

no possibility for physical or mental digestion. Instead things would go straight

through the tube. The normal bowel is derived from a similar type of cells to the

Antony Garelick6

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

ambr

idge

] at

05:

48 2

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

skin but its structure enables digestion, absorption and metabolism of contents:

processes which mirror those required in order to think. Digestion also requires

the capacity to hold things for a sufficient time, to contain them, in order for the

process to operate, and this is again true of the mind: one has to be able to contain

mental events for sufficient time to process them. In the work that we do there is

the added need to contain them sufficiently to enable them to become conscious

and therefore verbally communicated. The alternative, acting out, is a

communication that takes place via the body, it bypasses the mind and therefore

bypasses consciousness.

I found that thiswayof thinking enabledme to conceptualize the problemsof this

patient in terms of her disordered body ego. Hermental digestion was compromised

because her external skin metaphorically formed her bowel. The capacity of the

patient to feelmore integrated, inmy view, is linked to her capacity to internalize the

functioning container which was a consequence of this work.

Before turning to the next case I would like to make a brief comment about

technique. I have not found it therapeutically useful to focus on attacks on thinking

and issues of aggression in the early phases of the work; in my experience

premature interpretation of aggression, and challenges to narcissistic defences, are

likely to lead to problems in the work. I think this fits in with Rosenfeld’s advice on

technique in his book, Impasse and interpretation (Rosenfeld, 1987).

Struggling with this type of patient in a psychoanalytic set-up is rather

like using an electron microscope. You are observing things at very high

magnification and this has both advantages and disadvantages. The advantages

are that you can get a more detailed understanding of certain phenomena.

The disadvantages, as with the microscope, are that the greater the magnification

the smaller the field you can observe: you do not see the pattern or larger picture.

Supervision and a workshop are essential in supporting this type of work in order

to preserve the view of the larger picture.

Case 2

I will now describe another case with similar symptomatology but being treated

in quite a different way. The patient was a young woman, 20-years-old, who had

a very deprived and abusive background – in particular an abusive mother.

The patient had spent most of the last 10 years in one form or another of

institutionalized care. Her primary diagnosis was intractable obsessive

compulsive disorder (OCD) with numerous rituals, problems sleeping,

particularly sleeping on a bed, and fear of touching things, again associated

with a fear of losing parts of herself. She was treated as an in-patient with an

intensive cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) programme.

The patient was presented at a clinical work seminar because she was

deteriorating as the treatment programme progressed, with increased self-

destructive acting out. The focus of the work was on symptom removal. In effect,

removing the defences which, in my opinion, the patient had constructed in order

Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy 7

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

ambr

idge

] at

05:

48 2

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

to try to preserve both her body ego and her sense of self. This patient was presented

at a much lower level of magnification – a case presentation – so the patterns are

much easier to see. However the detailed knowledge, gained from the analytic work

with the first patient I have just presented, enabled me to understand the therapeutic

dilemma. The staff who were trying their best were experienced by the patient as

driving her mad. This mirrored the experience she had had with her mother. There

was an unconscious re-enactment taking place, with the staff being experienced by

the patient transferentially as the disturbed mother.

An ability to explain this to the staff, and to show that the patient’s defences

were critical at this junction in enabling the patient to preserve her bodily

integrity and avert dissolution of the self, enabled the clinical team to understand

why the patient was becoming more disturbed. They then became receptive to

reformulating both their treatment programme and the diagnosis, so that although

phenomenologically it was true that she had OCD, the larger picture was that this

was a defence against a fragmented and more psychotic internal state.

Case 3

I will now discuss a third case which, although unique in the presentation,

demonstrates very different aspects of psychosis. The main characteristics were

delusional beliefs and concrete psychotic identifications. I have chosen this case

to demonstrate the range of psychosis and to remind readers that the current

psychiatric diagnostic classification lacks precision, and it is more accurate to

talk of psychoses or schizophrenias.

The presentation was not of fragmentation or confusion, but rather the

opposite: a very rigid coherent belief system – a defensive symptom often

formidably difficult to penetrate. The patient in question was a late adolescent,

still at school, who was directed by the court to undergo psychological treatment.

The index offence was the disembowelling of two sheep. Attempting to establish

a therapeutic alliance in this type of circumstance is formidably difficult. The

whole structure of the therapeutic set-up in this case fitted in with the patient’s

paranoid anxieties that I would be a judge who would savagely attack him if he

made even the hint of a transgression. The direction by the court in the external

world corresponds to his internal world where a primitive punitive super-ego

resides. The main characteristics of the therapist–patient interaction were the

incredible stillness of the patient, his laser-like gaze and silence. The therapist felt

transfixed and was devoid of any associations and had an absence of thought.

This psychotic emptiness can be reproduced in clinicians outside the room:

one of the characteristics of the psychosis workshop that Richard Lucas and

I facilitated was a pattern of initial silence and lack of thoughts or associations

when a psychotic patient had been presented. It took quite some time for ideas

and for some more lively interchange to emerge. The initial comments tended to

be about the medication, its type and dose, about the phenomenology of the

mental state, and about the diagnosis. This broke the ice and slowly, the responses

Antony Garelick8

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

ambr

idge

] at

05:

48 2

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

broadened and moved away from the conventional medical model to the

psychological domain and, when the workshop was working well, free

association. The workshop in effect acts as the auxiliary container where the

free associations of the workshop participants, which in part reflect different

fragments of the patient’s mind, can be held and processed. Reactions to the

material can generate diametrically opposite reactions in the participants of the

workshop; the notion of conflict in the mind of the patient only becomes more

tangible when the therapeutic work generated by the workshop results in a

diminution of splitting and projective processes. In primary process thinking

there are no contradictions.

Returning to the patient, his preoccupation when he did speak was to ask what

the therapist would do if the patient did not attend, would he report the patient

either to the court or to the police? The therapist had the difficult task of conveying

that he was there to help the patient but was also bound by the court directive.

There were long silences which the therapist often broke, trying to find something

to say or ask which would diffuse the persecutory tension in the sessions.

Slowly over time the tension eased and the patient asked if he could bring

something to show the therapist. The therapist said yes and the patient brought in

a large framed picture which he carefully unwrapped. It was a portrait of a falcon

that he had obsessionally and meticulously painted. It filled the entire canvas.

The speaking phase of the therapy now began: the patient described falcons in

meticulous detail. He explained that they were not aggressive – they only killed

to eat – and that they were very territorial, they would either face off or fight an

intruder as necessary. He also said that he was trying to breed falcons but had so

far been unsuccessful. It emerged that when he had free time, particularly at the

weekends, he would sit at the top of the highest point of a tree and would stay up

there all day – he was a boarder at a boarding school and lived in the country.

One could now begin to make sense of the episode with the sheep and

the early phases of the therapy. He was psychotically identified with a falcon.

The whole therapeutic set up, the entire room, was his territory and the therapist

was the intruder. Only when the threat substantially diminished could verbal

communication start. During these initial months no interpretations were offered

to the patient. It emerged that the index offence was preceded by a homosexual

encounter with one of his school masters. At a more neurotic level this patient

was full of homosexual anxieties regarding his male therapist.

Only a partial understanding of the index offence was achieved, namely

identification with the falcon, and he being identified with the sheep in terms of the

homosexual encounter. As a matter of interest no reference was made by the patient

to his family during the course of the therapy. One of the things that might strike one

when discussing the casemany years after the therapy took place is how obvious the

identifications with the falcon are. This was not so at the time, which I think reflects

the degree of impact that psychotic processes have on one’s own capacity to think,

whether as a therapist or supervisor, when working with this group of patients.

Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy 9

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

ambr

idge

] at

05:

48 2

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

An important aspect of technique in paranoid states of mind is the challenge

of how to talk to the patient. Powerful projection into the therapist takes place so

the therapist cannot make direct interpretation or even directly address the patient

because the patient experiences this as being attacked by their own projections.

This patient found a creative solution to this problem by bringing the painting, a

third object that both therapist and patient could look at, and communication

could then take place via this third object. This aspect of technique is reflected in

a less concrete way in John Steiner’s paper on therapist-centred and patient-

centred interpretations (Steiner, 1993).

Case 4

The final case is also someone who presents with a rigid coherent belief system.

She was referred by a plastic surgeon because she had a rigid belief that she was

ugly and wanted cosmetic surgery. She was in fact an attractive, successful young

woman but she held the belief about her ugliness with delusional intensity and on

presentation hid herself under a curtain of long hair so her face was hardly visible;

she was also becoming more and more socially withdrawn. A formal diagnosis of

Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) was made and her problems regarded as a

neurotic disorder. However, these difficulties were progressively taking over her

life and it became apparent that she was in a mono-symptomatic delusional state,

a common diagnosis in the past but now out of fashion. The patient ostensibly

only attended in order to persuade the therapist and psychiatrist to prevail over

the surgeon so that she could have surgery. She believed that she was right and

everybody else was not. In this type of case there are clear battle lines: the patient

is convinced they are right, the therapist thinks they are delusional. So there is no

overt therapeutic alliance at the beginning of treatment.

The mental geography in such cases is clear. All their psychopathology is

projected onto the surface of the body, their appearance. There is a clear split

between the psychotic part of the mind, which totally dominated her thinking, and

the non-psychotic part of hermind,which in a therapeutic set-up is located and held

in the therapist. The early phase of therapy in this case, as in many others, consists

of a relentless attack on the therapist’s sanity and objectivity, with attempts by the

psychotic part of the patient’s mind to triumph. In effect this is an externalization

of the inner battle between the psychotic and the non-psychotic parts of the mind.

The problem in such cases is that the psychotic part of the mind is larger and more

powerful than the sane part of the mind. Reinforcements are needed. The therapist

functions as an aspect of that reinforcement, representing the sane auxiliary ego.

In very severe cases of this sort additional reinforcements are often recruited

such as behavioural/cognitive interventions. These can be helpful and valued by

the patient, but in my experience are not sufficient in themselves because focus on

symptom removal is insufficient. They do not address the troubled internal world

of the patient with its unconscious determinants, including the vast area of

emotional deprivation and developmental psychopathology. These patients and the

Antony Garelick10

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

ambr

idge

] at

05:

48 2

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

psychotic part of their minds want a manic solution to their problems, an

‘exorcism’, preferably surgical. This has a seductive appeal and holds out the

magical solution of a transformation without psychic pain, a form of manic repair.

This type of case is I think also a metaphor for a type of thinking prevalent in

society, and in the NHS in particular, which results in the marginalization of the

psychoanalytic approach. Converting depression to common misery (Freud,

1895) is not a very appealing strap line!

Wearing down the psychotic part of this patient’s mind was slow, difficult

work and invariably in this type of case the process of shifting the psychic world

back from the surface and her appearance to the inside, re-establishing the

internal world in her mind, resulted in psychic pain and depression. It was only

then that the true reparatory work could be undertaken and she could continue her

voyage to ultimate improvement.

What holds such a patient in treatment? It is the small aspect of the patient’s

mind that knows that they need help to remedy their inner problems, in

conjunction with the therapist focusing on engagement with the inner world of

the patient and using psychoanalytic understanding to speak to that sane part of

the patient. The therapist’s ability to stay in a human relationship with the patient

and navigate this difficult and uncertain terrain is the basis from which a

therapeutic relationship and alliance can slowly be built. For that to occur,

confidence, tenacity and belief in the analytic undertaking, as well as realistic

hope, need to be held by the therapist. This building of alliance also needs

pragmatism and humility so that we can learn from the patient by being

introduced to their personal world.

A rigid clinical approach, psychoanalytic or not, which is ritualistic in form

impedes the work; equally too much pragmatism and flexibility also impedes the

work because there isn’t a sufficiently firm container. A difficult balance has to be

struck which enables there to be a consistent and firm holding of one’s own

psychoanalytic frame of mind. This is no easy task, and as I have written above I

think it needs the support of both supervision and clinical workshops like the

psychosis workshop to support such an undertaking.

I hope that this paper has given a flavour of the challenges of this type of work

and issues of technique that need to be considered. I hope it will act as a stimulus,

so that the work that Richard was so talented at is taken up by younger

generations of psychiatrists, psychotherapists and psychoanalysts.

References

Beard, R.M. (1969). An outline of Piaget’s developmental psychology. London: Routledge.Bion, W.R. (1955). The development of schizophrenic thought. International Journal of

Psycho-Analysis, 37, p. 266–275. Reprinted in Second thoughts (1967).Bion, W.R. (1957). Differentiation of the psychotic from the non-psychotic personality.

In Second thoughts (pp. 43–64). New York: Jason Aronson (1967).Bion, W.R. (1962). A theory of thinking. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 43,

p. 306–310. Reprinted in Second thoughts (1967).

Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy 11

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

ambr

idge

] at

05:

48 2

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

Freud, S. (1895). Studies on hysteria. In SE, 2, p. 305. London: Hogarth.Lucas, R. (2009). The psychotic wavelength. London: Routledge.Rey, H. (1994). Universals of psychoanalysis in the treatment of psychotic and borderline

states, p. 7. London: Free Association Books.Rosenfeld, H. (1987). Impasse and interpretation. London: Tavistock Publications.Steiner, J. (1993). Problems of psychoanalytic technique. In Psychic Retreats (pp. 131–147).

London: Routledge.

Antony Garelick12

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

ambr

idge

] at

05:

48 2

7 O

ctob

er 2

014