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Treating People with Psychosis in Institutions: A Psychoanalytic Perspective

Author(s) : Belinda S. Mackie

Reviews and Endorsements

‘Psychoanalysis has from the beginning had a role to play in understanding human endeavour, way beyond the therapeutic work of the consulting room. Working with institutions is one of the biggest fields for its application. However, the combination of understanding both therapeutic and institutional work is a lot less common. Here is a book that makes a scholarly survey of the whole of this field in which institutions are the arena for therapy, for understanding the work practice of caring, and for developing healthy social systems. This book is a fine example of a coherent historical and geographical account of these dispersed mission-like centres of expertise.’
- Professor R. D. Hinshelwood, Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, UK

‘This book is theoretically wide-ranging and examines how the conceptual frameworks of a variety of different psychoanalytic perspectives have informed the development of institutions for the treatment of the seriously mentally ill, including those diagnosed with psychoses or who have undergone psychotic episodes.’
- Susan Long, PhD, author of The Perverse Organisation and its Deadly Sins, and editor of Socioanalytic Methods

‘Belinda S. Mackie has written a rich and comprehensive historical and theoretical account of psychoanalysis in mental health institutions. She clearly and critically reviews a wide range of psychoanalytic approaches across different continents and eras. This important resource fills a large gap from which emerges a general assessment of the value and validity of utilising a psychoanalytic method in the institutional treatment of psychosis. The author skilfully conveys the sense of what made the particular institutions special - historically, theoretically and clinically.’
- Douglas Kirsner, PhD, Emeritus Professor, Philosophy and Psychoanalytic Studies, Deakin University; author of Unfree Associations; Honorary Member of the American Psychoanalytic Association

‘Exploring the advances in the treatment of schizophrenia and psychosis over the last hundred years or so, this fascinating book tells the story of the way in which psychoanalysis flourished in institutions in the twentieth century. If Freud had wished for psychoanalysis to inherit the promised land of psychiatry, then it was into the field of treating psychosis that psychoanalysis would need to venture. Belinda S. Mackie’s account, with a particular dash of Lacan, narrates the emergence of psychoanalysis as a mainstay idea in the treatment of psychosis and shows how Freud’s dream was at last realised. Demonstrating how the development of the best known psychiatric institutions were threaded together by common psychoanalytic family ties, Mackie’s book makes for essential reading.’
- Dr Gary Winship, Associate Professor, School of Education, University of Nottingham; Senior Fellow, Institute of Mental Health