Brian, Psychosis, and the Language of Love

Abstract

Brian grew up in poverty, dropped out of high school at sixteen, and was homeless and psychotic at eighteen. At fifty, he is more than a survivor of poverty, neglect, abuse, and the onset of schizophrenia. When I began to see him for psychotherapy in 1999, I could not have known he would teach me an invaluable lesson about speaking the language of love with a patient. But he did. This is the story of how that happened.

Keywords:

• analytic love
• dreams
• Paul Russell
• psychosis
• trauma

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A version of this paper was presented at the Brookline Community Mental Health Center and the 2016 IAPSP conference in Boston. I want to thank Brian for being one of my teachers and for giving me permission to tell our story.

Notes

¹ “The ownership of feelings is not given. It must be negotiated. It is a crucial negotiation, because knowing who one is depends upon it. This is one of the most important reasons that attachment is essential to the growth and development of the capacity to feel. To begin with, feelings are located at a distance where they can be seen and focused more clearly; that is to say, they are seen as belonging to someone else. Paranoia is the beginning of the capacity to feel” (Russell, 2006b, p. 626).

² Bromberg is following Reik’s lead here as he acknowledges. See also Stern’s (1997) idea of “courting surprise.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Suzi Naiburg

Suzi Naiburg, Ph.D., LICSW, is a graduate and faculty member of the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis in private practice in Belmont, MA. She is the author of Structure and Spontaneity in Clinical Prose: A Writer’s Guide for Psychoanalysts and Psychotherapists (Routledge, 2015). She is also a writing coach, editor, and book doctor who taught over 100 clinical writing workshops and currently leads several ongoing writing groups.