Ego-structuring psychotherapy.

Abstract

Psychoanalysis regards psychosis as an early disturbance in the development of the personality, specifically, of the ego. The disturbance occurs during that period prior to the castration complex and thus before the phase when the ordering of relations becomes oedipal. Responsible for this disturbance is, according to Freud, foreclosure (verwerfung) of an important factor that normally accomplishes the primal repression (urverdrängung) and which renders repression proper (verdrängung) out of the question. According to Lacan this factor is the Name of the Father, which instigates the metaphorical dimension as such and, thereby, makes language come into action through a pact between the subject and the Other. In psychosis, Lacan postulates a foreclosure of the Name of the Father, which hinders the unconscious, structured as a language, from safeguarding the ego and the world, that is, the imaginary. Ego-structuring psychotherapy brings the Name of the Father into effect, enabling the psychotic person to become linguistically structured; consequently, a world view develops in the person and he or she becomes a historically determined person engaged in fulfilling a plan for life.