Some Remarks on the Analytical Treatment of Untriggered Psychosis
This article aims to examine the question of how private-practice psychoanalysts approach patients presenting with untriggered psychosis. The therapeutic offer appears to be restricted, in the sense that the treatment tends to focus solely on psychotherapeutic concerns, without extending to the discovery of unconscious knowledge. Is this merely an extreme precaution taken by analysts in the face of the risk of decompensation? Or does it reflect a discomfort among clinicians when it comes to identifying untriggered psychosis, thereby raising questions about diagnosis and the direction of the treatment? The use of ambiguous terminology to name untriggered psychosis seems to confirm this. It has thus been labeled “white psychosis,” “cold psychosis,” “borderline state,” or “ordinary psychosis.” We propose to define untriggered psychosis and to explore the clinical relevance of structural identification based on lacanian theory. In this perspective, we present a methodological tool specific to the detection of a psychosis that has not yet fully manifested: the examination of certainty, along with its complementary indicators and the subject’s compensatory modes of stabilization.
Keywords
- untriggered psychosis
- structural identification
- diagnosis
- treatment direction
- terminology
