ABSTRACT
This contribution deals with the difficulty in understanding the specific nature of psychotic functioning. These patients distort their perceptive apparatus to create dissociated sensorial worlds in which to live. They cannot be treated with the analytic technique employed with neurotic patients because they are unable to use the intuitive functions that enable psychic reality to be recognized. My hypothesis is that their mind functions as a sensory organ that is able to produce a new alternative reality to the real one. This paper develops a series of considerations on the nature of the enigma of psychosis and the way in which it is possible to analytically meet the psychotic patient.
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Franco De Masi
Franco De Masi is a analyst of the Italian Psychoanalytical Society and former President of the Centro Milanese di Psicoanalisi and Secretary of the Training Institute of MilanHe is a medical doctor and a psychiatrist who has worked for many years in psychiatric hospitals.In the last 40 years he has been working as a full time psychoanalyst in Milan. He has published several papers in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, in the Rivista Italiana di Psicoanalisi and in other psychoanalytical journals.His main interests have been focused on the theoretical and technical psychoanalytical issues related to severely ill or psychotic patients.