The Freudian Clinic of the Onset of Psychosis

The author aims to examine the genesis and evolution of the Freudian clinic of the onset of psychosis, based on the entire body of Freud’s work. He follows the conceptual development of the founder of psychoanalysis, from his first texts about the psychoneuroses (1894) to the essays of the late 1920s, and shows that Freud’s research mainly concerns the field of paranoiac psychosis and that despite his efforts and several speculative propositions, Freud fails to identify the specific mechanism of psychosis and of its triggering.