Psychiatry’s clinical tradition, psychoanalysis and current practices in mental health

Abstract

: The paper analyzes the clinic of psychosis in the mental health field by revisiting classical psychiatry categories through psychoanalysis, especially mental automatism. This paper aims to demonstrate the usefulness of what may be considered a working plan for the clinic of psychosis, which is today polarized into biological reductionism and psychosocial care. The accuracy of these classical psychiatric descriptions, revisited through Lacan’s theory, enables the recognition of the complexity of psychosis and especially the subject’s efforts to tackle the difficulties that result from this condition. In the conclusion, we analyze Clérambault’s syndrome called “mental automatism” so as to demonstrate every subject’s structural dependency on language and on the signifier, from which the subjectivity as an effect is derived.