Read more
A Structuralist Approach in Psychiatry presents an alternative view of the psychiatric patient and highlights a connection with continental post-structuralist thinking to provide a new approach to psychiatry.
After outlining the problems facing psychiatry, and the historical development of the field, this book outlines a structuralist model of the subject that does greater justice to the complexity involved while avoiding physicalist reductionism. It draws heavily on French structuralism, in which language plays a central structuring role that also influences the subject. The author draws on the works of Foucault, Lacan, and Bergson, as well as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Žižek. The structuralist model proposed engages with the intricate relationships between the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic in relation to the subject, particularly in the marginality of psychosis. Three clinical examples are provided to illustrate this: the syndromes of Cotard, Capgras, and negative hallucination. These examples demonstrate how the negative within the subject manifests itself in their symptomatology. However, the negative also plays a role in the normal development of the subject when they encounter the Symbolic and enter the world of language. Time and again, the subject must reinvent themselves through speech. This model, grounded in the concept of the zero point, has implications for an alternative anthropology and for psychiatry, where speaking and listening take centre stage.
This book will be of interest to mental healthcare professionals, including psychiatric nurses, psychiatrists, psychologists, and physician assistants, and those studying to enter these professions.
List of contents
Part one Positioning of modern psychiatry
Chapter 1. Outline of the problem facing psychiatry
Chapter 2. Historical development of Psychiatry from the Enlightenment
Part two Structuralism and nothingness
Chapter 3. Structuralism
Chapter 4. Fundamental Impossibilities
Chapter 5. Nothingness and Science
Chapter 6. Nothingness as creative moment
Part three Three Experiences of Nothingness in the Clinic
Chapter 7. As in a black mirror; Cotard's syndrome
Chapter 8. The Stranger in ourselves; Capgras Syndrome
Chapter 9. Experience of Nothingness
Part four Towards a Different Perspective of the Subject
Chapter 10. Subject and Science
Chapter 11. Looking for the Psyche in Psychiatry
Chapter 12. Sketch of an Alternative
Part five The Creative Power of Nothingness
Chapter 13. Friedrich Nietzsche and Degree Zero of Morality
Chapter 14. Interlude, Fable
Chapter 15. Martin Heidegger and Nothingness
Chapter 16. Nothingness at Jacques Lacan
Chapter 17. Slavoj Žižek: Can it be Less than Nothing?
Chapter 18. Genealogy of Creation
Chapter 19. Towards a Structuralist Psychiatry
Chapter 20. The Role of Linguistics in a Therapeutic Perspective
Chapter 21. The Eclipse of the (Psychotic) Subject?
Chapter 22. What about the Self?
Part six To Resist the Death Instinct of Nothingness
Chapter 23. An Object Relations Theory without an Object
Chapter 24. Psychiatry and the Transcendental
Chapter 25. The Ethical Implications of Mysticism and Desire
Chapter 26. The Subject as a Dynamic Process: From Deadlock to Transformation-Symbolisation as a Response to Nothingness
Chapter 27. Everything or Nothing-About Mysticism and the Genesis of the Subject
About the author
Jos de Kroon is a psychiatrist, psychotherapist and psychoanalyst working at the Reinier van Arkel institution of Mental Health in 's-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands. He publishes on the subjects of psychiatry and science, Freud, and Lacan. His publications include:
Language and psychosis (1993),
The history of psychiatry (1999),
About the soul (2007),
The voice of the Other (2010, about verbal hallucinations), and
Hamlet versus Oedipus or a matrixial orientation? (2020).
