In Transactional Analysis of Schizophrenia: The Naked Self, Zefiro Mellacqua presents a full assessment of the relevance and value of transactional analysis in understanding, conceptualizing and treating schizophrenia in contemporary clinical settings. Opening with a review of Eric Berne’s ideas, Mellacqua applies theory to the understanding and psychotherapeutic treatment of people suffering from first-episode schizophrenia and to those already living with more long-lasting psychotic levels of self-disturbance. The chapters address a series of crucial methodological themes, including the need for both intensive and extensive analytic sessions; the therapist’s tolerance of uncertainty and not knowing; the informative quality of both therapist’s and patient’s embodiment(s); the emergence of the transference-countertransference relationship; the link between silent transactions and unconscious communication; dream analysis; and the value of regular supervisions. Mellacqua’s approach incorporates meetings with family and caregivers, as well as emphasising multidisciplinary work with patients in a variety of settings, such as in hospitals, outpatient clinics, and psychiatric home treatment. The book is illustrated with engaging clinical case studies throughout, which illuminate the schizophrenic experience and provide examples of how these tools can be used to help patients. Transactional Analysis of Schizophrenia demonstrates how those who suffer from acute schizophrenia, especially those at their very first episode of psychosis, can make an effective recovery and live a satisfying life through the therapeutic application of transactional analysis. It will be essential reading for transactional analysts, psychodynamically oriented psychotherapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, nurses, social workers, academics and all mental health professionals working with people suffering from schizophrenic psychoses. See the below link for an interview about the book with Gianpiero Petriglieri and series editor William F. Cornell: https://vimeo.com/499800269

Do psychotic disorders make sense? Are psychotic symptoms amenable to interpretation? Understanding Psychosis: A Psychoanalytic Approach takes the various pathways to psychotic illness outlined by psychoanalytic clinicians and scholars and integrates them into a model that allows a systematic assessment of relevant psychodynamic dimensions in the diagnosis of psychotic disorders, and which serves as a guide to psychotherapy with psychotically ill patients. Joachim Küchenhoff reviews and integrates various psychoanalytic concepts and theories about psychosis into a multi-dimensional psychodynamic model that allows an assessment and understanding of the patient’s subjective experience, objective psychological capabilities, and interpersonal resources. Küchenhoff helps the therapist to establish a basic attitude in working psychodynamically with patients and to understand the dynamics of the therapeutic relationship. Understanding Psychosis also addresses specific issues that can arise in work with clients experiencing psychosis, including understanding imminent crises or precursor states, elucidating semiotic qualities in seemingly negative symptoms, differentiating the psychotic and a non-psychotic part of the personality and providing a dynamic approach to the psychopharmacological treatment. Clinical vignettes and three detailed case reports are included in the book. Understanding Psychosis will be an essential guide for psychiatrists, psychotherapists and psychoanalysts working with patients experiencing psychosis. It will also be of use to psychologists, and academics and students of psychotherapy, psychiatry and psychoanalysis for psychosis.

What Freud called the "stone wall" was first breached by this pioneering psychiatrist and psychoanalyst with this seminal work in 1969. This substantially revised and enlarged edition is the comprehensive and definitive handbook for practitioners of the talking cure of the disorders that arise before speech.

Paradox and Counterparadox introduces the English-speaking public to the first results of a research plan drawn up my the Milan Center for Family Studies at the end of 1971 and put into practice at the beginning of 1972. The book reports the therapeutic work carried out by the authors with fifteen families, five with children presenting serious psychotic disturbances, and ten with young adults diagnosed as schizophrenics in acute phase. Though accepting the Bleulerian term schizophrenia, by now in general use, the authors have used it to indicate not the sickness of an individual–as in the traditional medical model–but a peculiar pattern of communication inseparable from the other patterns of communication observable in the natural group (in this case, the family) in which it manifests itself. Starting from the position that modern sciences concerned with communication emphasize the central role of paradox as the source of paralyzing disturbances as well as of creative transformations, the authors demonstrate that it is possible to intervene in a family in schizophrenic transaction by devising original and paradoxical methods in order to release the action-pattern from disturbance to transformation. The counterparadoxes generated in this process, illustrated through a great number of examples, are rigorously analyzed in accordance with the conceptual models provided by general systems theory, by cybernetics, and by the pragmatics of human communication. The reader will recognize, in the cases presented, the stimulating originality and efficacy of this approach, one whose interest exceeds the purely clinical and which offers new points of departure for an ecologic vision of human relationships. A Jason Aronson Book

Schizophrenia has been one of psychiatry's most contested diagnostic categories. The Sublime object of Psychiatry studies representations of schizophrenia across a wide range of disciplines and discourses: biological and phenomenological psychiatry, psychoanalysis, critical psychology, antipsychiatry, and postmodern philosophy.

First published in 2002. Schizophrenia: A Scientific Delusion?, first published in 1990, made a very significant contribution to the debates on the concepts of schizophrenia and mental illness. These concepts remain both influential and controversial and this new updated second edition provides an incisive critical analysis of the debates over the last decade. As well as providing updated versions of the historical and scientific arguments against the concept of schizophrenia which formed the basis of the first edition, Boyle covers significant new material relevant to today’s debates.

This book looks at why, despite profound advances in psychological science and neuroscientific analyses of schizophrenia, outcomes for the disorder have changed little over the past 100 years. It analyzes the limiting role on treatment development of diagnostic classifications and views of the disorder as caused by a core pathology, and instead promotes the idea of individually tailored, multimodal treatment for distinct disorder features (e.g., positive symptoms, cognitive deficits).

The first advanced clinical textbook for many years, written for psychotherapists and counsellors who use Transactional Analysis in their practice or who wish to expand their repertoire.